Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/127

Rh been things—my silence among them—which I haven't known how you'd take.'

'Well, you see how.'

Braddle's stare was after all rather sightless. 'I see—but I don't understand. I'll tell you what you might do—you might come to me.'

'Oh, delighted. The old place?'

'The old place.' Braddle had taken out his eyeglass to wipe it, and he cocked it characteristically back. 'Our relation's rather rum, you know.'

'Yours and my wife's? Oh, most unconventional; you may depend on it she feels that herself.'

Braddle kept fixing him. 'Then does she want to crow over me?'

'To crow?' Chilver was vague. 'About what?'

His interlocutor hesitated. 'About having at least got you.'

'Oh, she's naturally pleased at that; but her satisfaction's after all a thing she can keep within bounds; and to see you again can only, I think, remind her more than anything else of what she did lose and now misses: your general situation, your personal advantages, your connections, expectations, magnificence.'

Braddle, on this, after a lingering frown, turned away, looking at his watch and moving for a minute to the window. 'When will you come? To-night?'

Chilver thought. 'Rather late—yes. With pleasure.'

His friend presently came back with an expression rather changed. 'What I meant just now was what it all makes of my relation and yours—the way we go into it.'

'Ah, well, that was extraordinary—the way we went into it—from the first. It was you, permit me to remark,' Chilver pleasantly said, 'who originally began going into it. Since you broke the ice I don't in the least mind its remaining broken.'

'Ah, but at that time,' Braddle returned, 'I didn't know in the least what you were up to.'