scuffled, failing a real scratch, with such a character; and he had at
present the flutter of feeling that something of this would abide. _He_
hadn't been hurrying home, at the London time, in any case; he was doing
nothing then, and had continued to do it; he would want, before showing
suspicion--that had been his attitude--to have more, after all, to go
upon. Mrs. Folliott also, and with a great actual profession of it,
remembered and rejoiced; and, also staying in the house as she was, sat
with him, under a spreading palm, in a wondrous rococo salon, surrounded
by the pinkest, that is the fleshiest, imitation Boucher panels, and
wanted to know if he _now_ stood up for his swindler. She would herself
have tumbled on a cloud, very passably, in a fleshy Boucher manner,
hadn't she been over-dressed for such an exercise; but she was quite
realistically aware of what had so naturally happened--she was prompt
about Bloodgood's "flight."

She had acted with energy, on getting back--she had saved what she
could; which hadn't, however, prevented her losing all disgustedly some
ten thousand dollars. She was lovely, lively, friendly, interested, she
connected Monteith perfectly with their discussion that day during the
water-party on the Thames; but, sitting here with him half an hour, she
talked only of her peculiar, her cruel sacrifice--since she should
never get a penny back. He had felt himself, on their meeting, quite
yearningly reach out to her--so decidedly, by the morning's end,
and that of his scattered sombre stations, had he been sated with
meaningless contacts, with the sense of people all about him intensely,
though harmlessly, animated, yet at the same time raspingly indifferent.
_They_ would have, he and she at least, their common pang--through which
fact, somehow, he should feel less stranded. It wasn't that he wanted to
be pitied--he fairly didn't pity himself; he winced, rather, and even
to vicarious anguish, as it rose again, for poor shamed Bloodgood's
doom-ridden figure. But he wanted, as with a desperate charity, to give
some easier turn to the mere ugliness of the main facts; to work off his
obsession from them by mixing with it some other blame, some other pity,
it scarce mattered what--if it might be some other experience; as an
effect of which larger ventilation it would have, after a fashion and
for a man of free sensibility, a diluted and less poisonous taste.

By the end of five minutes of Mrs. Foll