Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/161

 "I don t see why we should be sacrificed to the clever people, they have so many compensations. It is the stupid people who can only feel things, who are the really important factors of life, and they have all the suffering," cried Cynthia bitterly. She was forgetting the part she had planned for herself.

"What are we talking about? " said Adrian suddenly.

"You were being brilliant again," she said, collecting herself with an effort.

"And my cigarette has gone out," he laughed, and went across to a candle to light it.

They listened mechanically to the voices through the open door.

"It's no use, it won't draw, I tell you. Nobody could make it draw, it's got stuffed up with something. I am quite sure the strings I have been eating are not tobacco at all. It s the stupidest cigarette I ever smoked."

"It looks a bit played, doesn't it? You ve used all my matches and the spills hang out in the other room. Stick to it a moment while I freeze on to a coal, will you? "

Margaret evidently had no difficulty in sticking to the cigarette, and Dicky must have achieved the extraordinary feat of freezing on to a coal, for there was no more conversation in the drawing-room for the next few moments, and when it began afresh a piano-organ in the street below completely drowned it.

"That s a good effect," said Adrian, leaning over the window-box, "the lamps and the background of bushes, and the weird light on that man s face—awfully fine, isn't it?"

She came and looked out with him.

"Very," she said; "have you been painting much lately?

"No. I've been literally off colour. Weather, I suppose."

"Or a new lady friend?" she suggested, under cover of the clanging music in the street. Her