"I could not say, sir." Mr. Norbury's manner is dignified, deferential, and dry. More serious than need be perhaps.
The Hon. Percival is not good at insight, and sees nothing of this. "It certainly appears to me," he says, taking his time over it, "that until breakfast has broken someone's fast, or someone has broken his own at the expense of breakfast.... What's that?"
"One of the ladies coming down, sir." Mr. Norbury would not, in the ordinary way of business, have mentioned this fact, but it had given him a resource against a pleasantry he found distasteful. Of course, _he_ knew the event of the morning. Yet he could not say to the gentleman:--"A truce to jocularity. A man was shot dead half a mile off last night, and the body has been taken to the Keeper's Lodge."
The lady coming downstairs was Miss Constance Smith-Dickenson, also uninformed about the tragedy. She had made her first appearance yesterday afternoon, and had looked rather well in a pink-figured muslin at dinner. The interchanges between this lady and the Hon. Percival, referring chiefly to the fact that no one else was down, seemed to have no interest for Mr. Norbury; who, however, noted that no new topic had dawned upon the conversation when he returned from a revision of the breakfast-table. The fact was that the Hon. Percival had detected in Miss Dickenson a fossil, and was feeling ashamed of a transient interest in her last night, when she had shown insight, under the guidance--suppose we say--of champagne. Her bloom had gone off, too, in a strange way, and bloom was a _sine qua non_ to this gentleman. She for her part was conscious of a chill having come between them, she having retired to rest the evening before with a refreshing sensation that all was not over--could not be--when so agreeable a man could show her such marked attention. That was all she would endorse of a very temperate Vanity's suggestions, mentally crossing out an s at the end of "attention." If you have studied the niceties of the subject, you will know how much that letter would have meant.
A single lady of a particular type gets used to this sort of thing. But her proper pride has to be kept under steam, like a salvage-tug in harbour when there is a full gale in the Channel. However, she is better off than her great-great-aunts, who were exposed to what was described as _satire_. Nowadays, presumably, Man is not the treasure he was, for a good many women seem to scrat on cheerfully enough without him. Or is it that in those days he was the only person employed on his own valuation?