‘Leave! Good heavens, no! I wish all our fellows were as fit as I am. And--’
‘Don’t pity me, dear friend. I don’t think it’s good for me. The world really uses me very well.’
‘Then it’s all right, I suppose,’ Madeline said, with sudden depression.
‘Of course it is. You are dining with us on the eighth?’
‘Engaged again? Don’t you WANT to break bread in my house, Miss Anderson?’ She was silent, and he insisted, ‘Tell me,’ he said.
She gave him instead a kind, mysterious smile.
‘I will explain to you what I feel about that some day,’ she said; ‘some day soon. I can’t accept Mrs. Innes’s invitation for the eighth, but--Brookes and I are going to take tea with the fakir’s monkeys on the top of Jakko tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Only Brookes.’ And she thought she had abandoned coquetry!
‘I really don’t know,’ reflected Madeline, as she caught another glimpse of Mrs. Innes vigorously dancing the reel opposite little Lord Billy in his Highland uniform, with her hands on her flowered-satin hips, ‘that I am behaving very well myself.’
Horace Innes looked round his wife’s drawing-room as if he were making an inventory of it, carefully giving each article its value, which happened, however, to have nothing to do with rupees. Madeline Anderson had been saying something the day before about the intimacy and accuracy with which people’s walls expressed them, and though the commonplace was not new to him, this was the first time it had ever led him to scan his wife’s. What he saw may be imagined, but his only distinct reflection was that he had no idea that she had been photographed so variously or had so many friends who wore resplendent Staff uniforms. The relation of cheapness in porcelain ornaments to the lady’s individuality was beyond him, and he could not analyze his feelings of sitting in the midst of her poverty of spirit. Indeed, thinking of his ordinary unsusceptibility to such things, he told himself sharply that he was adding an affectation of discomfort to the others that he had to bear; and that if Madeline had not given him the idea it would never have entered his mind. The less, he mused, that one had to do with finicking feelings in this world the better. They were well enough for people who were tolerably conditioned in essentials--he preferred this vagueness, even with himself, in connection with his marriage--otherwise they added pricks. Besides he had that other matter to think of.