“Burlap’s sweating you, Walter,” she had said.
“The paper’s very hard up.” He always had excuses for the shortcomings of other people toward himself.
“But why should you let yourself be swindled?”
“I’m not being swindled.” There was a note of exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of a man who knows he is in the wrong. “And even if I were, I prefer being swindled to haggling for my pound of flesh. After all, it’s my business.”
“And mine!” She held up the account book on which she had been busy when the conversation began. “If you knew the price of vegetables!”
He had flushed up and left the room without answering. The conversation, the case were typical of many others. Walter had never been deliberately unkind to her, only by mistake, out of excessive consideration for other people and while he was being unkind to himself. She had never resented these injustices. They proved how closely he associated her with himself. But now, now there was nothing accidental about his unkindness. The gentle considerate Walter had disappeared and somebody else—somebody ruthless and full of hate—was deliberately making her suffer.
Lady Edward laughed. “One wonders what he saw in her, if she’s so deplorable as you make out.”
“What does one ever see in anyone?” John Bidlake spoke in a melancholy tone. Quite suddenly he had begun to feel rather ill. An oppression in the stomach, a feeling of sickness, a tendency to hiccup. It often happened now. Just after eating. Bicarbonate didn’t seem to do much good. “In these matters,” he added, “we’re all equally insane.”
“Thanks!” said Lady Edward, laughing.
Making an essay to be gallant, “Present company excepted,” he said with a smile and a little bow. He stifled another hiccup. How miserable he was feeling! “Do you mind if I sit down?” he asked. “All this standing about …” He dropped heavily into a chair.
Lady Edward looked at him with a certain solicitude, but said nothing. She knew how much he hated all references to age, or illness, or physical weakness.
“It must have been that caviar,” he was thinking. “That beastly caviar.” He violently hated caviar. Every sturgeon in the Black Sea was his personal enemy.
“Poor Walter!” said Lady Edward, taking up the conversation where it had been dropped. “And he has such a talent.”
John Bidlake snorted contemptuously.
Lady Edward perceived that she had said the wrong thing—by mistake, genuinely by mistake, this time. She changed the subject.
“And Elinor?” she asked. “When’s your Elinor coming home? Elinor and Quarles?”
“Leaving Bombay tomorrow,” John Bidlake answered telegraphically. He was too busy thinking of the caviar and his visceral sensations to be more responsive.
VI
“De Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,” said Mr. Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly. He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles. The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India. One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose. It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments. There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it. At the word “fountain,” it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr. Sita Ram’s plate.
“Burke and Bacon,” Mr. Sita Ram went on sonorously, “Milton and Macaulay …”
“Oh, look!” Elinor Quarles’s voice was shrill with alarm. She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backward. Mr. Sita Ram turned toward her.
“What’s de matter?” he asked in a tone of annoyance. It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.
Elinor pointed. A very large gray toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda. In the silence its movements were audible—a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.
“De toad can do no harm,” said Mr. Sita Ram, who was accustomed to the tropical fauna.
Elinor looked beseechingly at her husband. The glance that he returned was one of disapproval.
“Really, my darling,” he protested. He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals. But he knew how to conceal his disgust stoically. It was the same with the food. There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish. But he had managed, none the less, to eat it. Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind driving it away,” she whispered. Her face expressed her inward agony. “You know how much I detest them.”
Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr. Sita Ram, got up, very tall and
