Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/311

Rh 'Well, if she did have it'—I tried to be cheerful—'isn't the whole thing then all right?'

'Oh, it's all right now, he replied—'now that we've got it all there before us. You see, they couldn't like me so much'—he wished me thoroughly to understand—'without wanting me to have been the man.'

'I see—that was natural.'

'Well,' said Marmaduke, 'it prevented the possibility of any one else.'

'Ah, that would never have done!' I laughed.

His own pleasure at it was impenetrable, splendid. 'You see, they couldn't do much, the old people—and they can do still less now—with the future; so they had to do what they could with the past.'

'And they seem to have done,' I concurred, 'remarkably much.'

'Everything, simply. Everything,' he repeated. Then he had an idea, though without insistence or importunity—I noticed it just flicker in his face. 'If you were to come to Westbourne Terrace'

'Oh, don't speak of that!' I broke in. 'It wouldn't be decent now. I should have come, if at all, ten years ago.'

But he saw, with his good humour, further than this. 'I see what you mean. But there's much more in the place now than then.'

'I dare say. People get new things. All the same!' I was at bottom but resisting my curiosity.

Marmaduke didn't press me, but he wanted me to know. 'There are our rooms—the whole set; and I don't believe you ever saw anything more charming, for her taste was extraordinary. I'm afraid, too, that I myself have had much to say to them.' Then as he made out that I was again a little at sea, 'I'm talking,' he went on, 'of the suite prepared for her marriage.' He 'talked' like a crown prince. 'They were ready, to the last touch—there was nothing more to be done. And