Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/103

Rh and all the while it was Julia who governed the succession of events. "Do be nice to her," Lady Agnes murmured to him, as he placed her in the vehicle at the door of the restaurant; and he guessed that it gave her a comfort to have left him sitting there with Mrs. Dallow.

Nick had every disposition to be nice to her; if things went as she liked them it was an acknowledgment of a certain force that was in her—the force of assuming that they would. Julia had her differences—some of them were much for the better; and when she was in a mood like this evening's, liberally dominant, he was ready to encourage her assumptions. While they waited for the return of the carriage, which had rolled away with his mother, she sat opposite to him, with her elbows on the table, playing first with one and then with another of the objects that encumbered it: after five minutes of which she exclaimed, "Oh, I say, we'll go!" and got up abruptly, asking for her jacket. He said something about the carriage's having had orders to come back for them, and she replied: "Well, it can go away again!" She added: "I don't want a carriage; I want to walk;" and in a moment she was out of the place, with the people at the tables turning round again and the caissière swaying in her high seat. On the pavement of the boulevard she looked up and down: there were people at little tables, at the door; there were people all over the broad expanse of the asphalt; there was a profusion of light and a pervasion of sound; and everywhere, though the establishment at which they had been dining was not in the thick of the fray, the tokens of a great traffic of pleasure, that