Maud felt, as she always felt when Thurso talked like this, as if a file had been drawn across her teeth. She tried to turn, not the conversation, but its tone.
"Oh, how?" she asked, with deep and genuine interest; for, like all sensible girls, she loved beautiful clothes, especially when beautiful people wore them. "She always makes everybody else look dowdy or overdressed. That must be such fun."
"Well, she had the diamond palisade, as she calls it, in her hair, and what she calls the ruby plaster all, all down her."
"Yes, but her dress?" said Maud. "I know the plaster."
"Her dress? Goodness knows what it was made of, but it looked--you know what whipped cream looks like compared to cream--it looked like whipped gold. Sort of froth of gold: not yellow, but gold. Melba was in the middle of the jewel-song when we came in, but at the end of it nobody was paying the slightest attention to her. Every glass in the house was turned on Catherine."
He got up and threw his cigarette-end away.
"And she's my wife," he added; and the four words carried tons of irony.
Maud got up also. She hated this: it was the process of the file again. She knew that Thurso talked to no one but her like that, but she deplored that he felt like that.
"Oh, Thurso, don't! All the worst of you spoke then. No, a pity that you feel like that. You are both such splendid people, really. And----"
"And I bore her, and she gets on my nerves," he remarked.
Maud gave a little frown and gesture of disapproval.
"You should never say such things," she said. "It is a mistake to say them just because they are--well, partly true. If they were untrue it would not matter. But to let yourself say a true thing, when that thing is a pity, only makes it more real. Speech confirms everything. Good gracious! if people would only hold their tongues on unpleasant topics, how the things themselves would improve! Oh, I am a philosopher."
He looked at her with great tenderness and affection.
"Are you?" he said. "I like you, anyhow. Go on."
"You don't do her justice," she said, "any more than she does you justice. You don't allow for each other. And--Thurso, I don't believe she is happy any more than you are."
"Why do you think that? She carves forty-eight hours out of every day, and fills them all, while the world looks on in envious admiration. That is her ideal, and she always attains it. And even her husband claps his hands."