She dragged a good deal of Burke into the complicated explanation, making it as impressive as she could. Captain Fox, who was no better than he should be, according to the speakers, paid rather frequent visits upon the young widow of the ground-floor flat, who should have been better than she was. To find that honest courtship explained the friendship was something of a disappointment. Mrs. Marks wished to be the first to announce the innocent interpretation, to claim authorship, indeed—having persistently advocated the darker view.
'Who'd ever have guessed that?' exclaimed Mrs. Wimble, off her guard a moment. 'You always told me——'
The face of her caller betrayed a passing flush.
'Oh, one always hoped,' she began primly, when Mrs. Wimble interrupted her with a firm, clear question:
'By the bye, who was she?' she asked.
And hearing it, Wimble felt his world turn upside down a moment. He realised, that is, that his wife saw it upside down. For his wife to ask such a question was as if he had asked it himself. He felt ashamed. His world turned inside out. He looked down on them. He rose abruptly, finding the energy to invent a true-escaping sentence:
'You ask who she was,' he said, not with intentional rudeness, yet firmly, 'when you ought to ask——'
Both ladies stared at him with surprise, waiting for him to finish. He was picking up the cup his sudden gesture had overturned.
'Who she is,' concluded Wimble, with the astonishment of positive rebuke in his tone. 'What can it matter who she was? It's what she is that's of importance. The Captain's got to live with that.' And then the escaping-sentence: 'If you'll excuse me, Mrs. Marks, I have to go upstairs to see a book'—he hesitated, stammered, and ended in confusion—'about a book.' And off he went, making a formal little bow at the door. He went into the dining-room down the passage, vaguely aware that he had not behaved very nicely. 'But, of course, I'm not a gentleman exactly,' he said to himself; 'what's called a gentleman, that is. Father was only an analytical chemist.'
He stood still a moment, then dropped into a chair beside the table with the red and black check cloth. His mind worked on by itself, as it were.