“Oh he’s good-looking. He’s handsome, my dear. Oddly—but distinctly!” Her ladyship was for treating it much as a joke.
But Mamie, all sombre, would have none of this. She boldly gave him up. “I think he’s awful.”
“He is indeed—delightfully. And where DO you get your ways of saying things? It isn’t anything—and the things aren’t anything. But it’s so droll.”
“Don’t let yourself, all the same,” Mamie consistently pursued, “be carried away by it. The thing can’t be done—simply.”
Lady Wantridge wondered. “‘Done simply’?”
“Done at all.”
“But what can’t be?”
“Why, what you might think—from his pleasantness. What he spoke of your doing for him.”
Lady Wantridge recalled. “Forgiving him?”
“He asked you if you couldn’t. But you can’t. It’s too dreadful for me, as so near a relation, to have, loyally— loyally to YOU—to say it. But he’s impossible.”
It was so portentously produced that her ladyship had somehow to meet it. “What’s the matter with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what’s the matter with YOU?” Lady Wantridge inquired.
“It’s because I WON’T know,” Mamie—not without dignity—explained.
“Then
“Precisely. Don’t. It’s something,” Mamie pursued, with some inconsequence, “that—somewhere or other, at some time or other—he appears to have done. Something that has made a difference in his life.”
“‘Something’?” Lady Wantridge echoed again. “What kind of thing?”
Mamie looked up at the light above the door, through which the London sky was doubly dim. “I haven’t the least idea.”
“Then what kind of difference?”
Mamie’s gaze was still at the light. “The difference you see.”
Lady Wantridge, rather obligingly, seemed to ask herself what she saw. “But I don’t see any! It seems, at least,” she added, “such an amusing one! And he has such nice eyes.”
“Oh DEAR eyes!” Mamie conceded; but with too much sadness, for the moment, about the connexions of the subject, to say more.
It almost forced her companion after an instant to proceed. “Do you mean he can’t go home?”
She weighed her responsibility. “I only make out—more’s the pity!—that he doesn’t.”
“Is it then something too terrible—?”
She thought again. “I don’t know what—for men—IS too terrible.”
“Well then as you don’t know what ‘is’ for women either—good-bye!” her visitor laughed.
It practically wound up the interview; which, however, terminating thus on a considerable stir of the air, was to give Miss Cutter for several days the sense of being much blown about. The degree to which, to begin with, she had been drawn—or perhaps rather pushed- -closer to Scott was marked in the brief colloquy that she on her friend’s departure had with him. He had immediately said it. “You’ll see if she doesn’t ask me down!”
“So soon?”
“Oh I’ve known them at places—at Cannes, at Pau, at Shanghai—do it sooner still. I always know when they will. You CAN’T make out they don’t love me!” He spoke almost plaintively, as if he wished she could.
“Then I don’t see why it hasn’t done you more good.”
“Why Mamie,” he patiently reasoned, “what more good COULD it? As I tell you,” he explained, “it has just been my life.”
“Then why do you come to me for money?”
“Oh they don’t give me THAT!” Scott returned.
“So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the best, must keep you up?”
He fixed on her the nice eyes Lady Wantridge admired. “Do you mean to tell me that already—at this very moment—I’m not distinctly keeping you?”
She gave him back his look. “Wait till she HAS asked you, and then,” Mamie added, “decline.”
Scott, not too grossly, wondered. “As acting for YOU?”
Mamie’s next injunction was answer enough. “But BEFORE—yes— call.”
He took it in. “Call—but decline. Good!”
“The rest,” she said, “I leave to you.” And she left it in fact with such confidence that for a couple of days she was not only conscious of no need to give Mrs. Medwin another turn of the screw, but positively evaded, in her fortitude, the reappearance of that lady. It was not till the fourth day that she waited upon her, finding her, as she had expected, tense.
