But Elena was not listening. “You know,” she re-began, “I could get out of it all very gracefully by telling you you drink too much. You couldn’t argue it, you know—particularly after your behavior last Tuesday.”
“Oh, now and then one must be sociable. You aren’t a prude, Elena—”
“However, I am not really afraid of that, somehow. I even confess I don’t actually mind your being rather good for nothing. No woman ever really does, though she has her preference, and pretends, of course, to mind a great deal. What I mean, then, is this: You don’t marry just me. I—I have very few relations, just two brothers and my mother; yet, in a sense, you know, you marry them as well. But I don’t believe you would like being married to them. They are so different from you, dear. Your whole viewpoint of life is different—”
I had begun to speak when she broke in: “No, don’t say anything, please, until I’m quite, quite through. My brothers are the most admirable men I ever knew. I love them more than I can say. I trust them more than I do you. But they are just good. They don’t fail in the really important things of life, but they are remiss in little ways, they—they don’t care for the little elegantnesses, if that’s a word. Even Arthur chews tobacco when he feels inclined. And he thinks no man would smoke a cigarette. Oh, I can’t explain just what I mean—”
“I think I understand, Elena. Suppose we let it pass as said.”
“And Mamma is not—we’ll say, particularly highly educated. Oh, you’ve been very nice to her. She adores you. You won her over completely when you took so much trouble to get her the out-of-print paper novels—about the village maidens and the wicked dukes—in that idiotic Carnation Series she is always reading. The whole affair was just like both of you, I think.”
“But, oh, my dear—!” I laughed.
“No, not one man in a thousand would have remembered it after she had said she did think the titles ‘were real tasty’; and I don’t believe any other man in the world would have spent a week in rummaging the secondhand bookstores, until he found them. Only I don’t know, even yet, whether it was really kindness, or just cleverness that put you up to it—on account of me. And I do know that you are nice to her in pretty much the same way you were nice to the negro cook yesterday. And I have had more advantages than she’s had. But at bottom I’m really just like her. You’d find it out some day. And—and that is what I mean, I think.”
I spoke at some length. It was atrocious nonsense which I spoke; in any event, it looked like atrocious nonsense when I wrote it down just now, and so I tore it up. But I was quite sincere throughout that moment; it is the Townsend handicap, I suspect, always to be perfectly sincere for the moment.
“Oh, well!” she said; “I’ll think about it.”
VII
That night Elena and I played bridge against Nannie Allsotts and Warwick Risby. I was very much in love with Elena, but I hold it against her, even now, that she insisted on discarding from strength. However, there was to be a little supper afterward, and you may depend upon it that Mrs. Vokins was seeing to its preparation.
She came into the room about eleven o’clock, beaming with kindliness and flushed—I am sure—by some slight previous commerce with the kitchen-fire.
“Well, well!” said Mrs. Vokins, comfortably; “and who’s a-beating?”
I looked up. I must protest, until my final day, I could not help it. “Why, we is,” I said.
And Nannie Allsotts giggled, ever so slightly, and Warwick Risby had half risen, with a quite infuriate face, and I knew that by tomorrow the affair would be public property, and promptly lost the game and rubber. Afterward we had our supper.
When the others had gone—for my footing in the house was such that I, by ordinary, stayed a moment or two after the others had gone—Elena Barry-Smith came to me and soundly boxed my jaws.
“That,” she said, “is one way to deal with you.”
A minute ago I had been ashamed of myself. I had not room to be that now; I was too full of anger. “I did make rather a mess of it,” I equably remarked, “but, you see, Nannie had shown strength in diamonds, and I simply couldn’t resist the finesse. So they made every one of their clubs. And I hadn’t any business to take the chance of course at that stage, with the ace right in my hand—”
“Arthur would have said, before he’d thought of it, ‘You damn fool—!’ And then he would have apologised for forgetting himself in the presence of a lady,” she said, in a sorry little voice. “Yes, you—you have hurt me,” she presently continued—“just as you meant to do, if that’s a comfort to you. I feel as though I’d smacked a marble statue. You are the sort that used to take snuff just before they had their heads cut off, and when they were in the wrong. And I’m not. That’s
