Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/300

292 'Then where does his fun come in?'

Lavinia turned away; again she seemed at a loss. At last she brought out: 'Make him show you her little photograph.'

But I remained unenlightened. 'Is her little photograph his fun?'

Once more she coloured for him. 'Well, it represents a young loveliness!'

'That he goes about showing?'

She hesitated. 'I think he has only shown it to me.'

'Ah, you're just the last one!' I permitted myself to observe.

'Why so, if I'm also struck?'

There was something about her that began to escape me, and I must have looked at her hard. 'It's very good of you to be struck!'

'I don't only mean by the beauty of the face,' she went on; 'I mean by the whole thing—by that also of the attitude of the parents, their extraordinary fidelity, and the way that, as he says, they have made of her memory a real religion. That was what, above all, he came to tell me about.'

I turned away from her now, and she soon afterwards left me; but I couldn't help its dropping from me before we parted that I had never supposed him to be that sort of fool.

 V

I were really the perfect cynic you probably think me, I should frankly say that the main interest of the rest of this matter lay for me in fixing the sort of fool I did suppose him. But I'm afraid, after all, that my anecdote amounts mainly to a presentation of my own folly. I shouldn't be so in possession of the whole spectacle had I not ended by accepting it, and I shouldn't have accepted it had it not, for my imagination, been saved somehow from grotesqueness. Let me say at once, however, that grotesqueness, and even indeed something