iott, however, he felt his dry
lips seal themselves to a makeshift simper. She could _take_ nothing--no
better, no broader perception of anything than fitted her own small
faculty; so that though she must have recalled or imagined that he had
still, up to lately, had interests at stake, the rapid result of her
egotistical little chatter was to make him wish he might rather have
conversed with the French waiter dangling in the long vista that showed
the oriental cafe as a climax, or with the policeman, outside, the top
of whose helmet peeped above the ledge of a window. She bewailed her
wretched money to excess--she who, he was sure, had quantities more; she
pawed and tossed her bare bone, with her little extraordinarily gemmed
and manicured hands, till it acted on his nerves; she rang all the
changes on the story, the dire fatality, of her having wavered and
muddled, thought of this and but done that, of her stupid failure to
have pounced, when she had first meant to, in season. She abused the
author of their wrongs--recognising thus too Monteith's right to loathe
him--for the desperado he assuredly had proved, but with a vulgarity
of analysis and an incapacity for the higher criticism, as her listener
felt it to be, which made him determine resentfully, almost grimly,
that she shouldn't have the benefit of a grain of _his_ vision or _his_
version of what had befallen them, and of how, in particular, it had
come; and should never dream thereby (though much would she suffer from
that!) of how interesting he might have been. She had, in a finer sense,
no manners, and to be concerned with her in any retrospect was--since
their discourse was of losses--to feel the dignity of history incur
the very gravest. It was true that such fantasies, or that any shade
of inward irony, would be Greek to Mrs. Folliott. It was also true,
however, and not much more strange, when she had presently the
comparatively happy thought of "Lunch with _us_, you poor dear!" and
mentioned three or four of her "crowd"--a new crowd, rather, for her,
all great Sunday lunchers there and immense fun, who would in a moment
be turning up--that this seemed to him as easy as anything else; so that
after a little, deeper in the jungle and while, under the temperature
as of high noon, with the crowd complete and "ordering," he wiped the
perspiration from his brow, he felt he was letting himself go. He did
that certainly to the extent of leaving far behind any que