And now, as he met Ducie’s eyes again, he perceived elation in them, disproportionate, futile, but delighted. It was the most trivial of foolish trifles, Floyd-Rosney said to himself, but this man had seen him set at naught, put to the blush, held up to ridicule by his wife, airily satiric, utterly unmindful of his dignity, nay, despising its tenuity, and leading the laugh at his discomfiture.
Ducie caught himself with difficulty. He was so conscious of the unguarded expression of his face, the look of relish, of triumph, of contempt surprised in his eyes, that he made haste to nullify the effect. The whole affair was the absent Randal’s, and he must take heed that he did not interfere by word or look or in any subtle wise in what did not concern him,--it was, indeed, of more complicated intent than heretofore he was aware. He was a man of very definite tact but he had hardly realized the extent of the endowment until that moment. He appreciated the subtle value of his own impulse, as if it had been another’s, when he said, directly addressing Floyd-Rosney, as if there had been only the element of good-natured joviality in the episode, “I think we are all likely to encounter dangers more formidable than microbes.--Have you any experience of cloud-bursts, Mr. Floyd-Rosney? This fall of water is something prodigious, to my mind.”
In his personal absorptions Floyd-Rosney had not noticed the rain. “Is it more than a ‘season,’ do you think?--the breaking up of this long drought?” Floyd-Rosney quickly adopted the incidental tone.
He was so essentially a proud man that he would fain think well of himself. His credulity expanded eagerly to the hope that to others the episode of the morning might seem, as apparently to this man, only a bit of gay badinage, the feminine insolence of a much indulged wife to her lenient lord and master. To himself it could not bear this interpretation, nor to her. He could never forget nor forgive the impulse that informed it. But he was quick to seize the opportunity to reinstate his self-possession, nay, the only possibility to “save his face” and hold up his head. Such demands his assuming dignity made on the deference of all about him that taken in this wise the incident could hardly appear serious.