“The monkish type doesn’t appeal to me, I own.”
“Ah, there you touch the point that has troubled me. It is not good for a man to live alone. My chief wish for him is that he may marry. I often urge it on him.”
“Well done.”
“One did hear,” Mr. Best went on, his small, ruddy face taking on a look of retrospective reprobation, “that there was an attachment to a certain young woman—the tale was public property—only as such do I allude to it—a very fashionable, very worldly young woman. I was relieved indeed when the rumor came to nothing. He escaped finally, I can’t help fancying it, this summer. I was much relieved.”
“Why so, pray?”
“I am rural, old-fashioned, my dear young man, and that type of young woman is one toward which, I own it, I find it difficult to feel charitably. She represents the pagan, the Christless element that I spoke of in our modern world. Her charm could not have been a noble one. Had our friend here succumbed to it, she could only have meant disaster in his life. She would have urged him into ambition, pleasure-seeking, dissipation. Of course I only cite what I have heard in my quiet corner, though I have had glimpses of her, passing with a friend, a very frivolous person, in a motor-car. She looked completely what I had imagined.”
“If you mean Miss Gifford,” said Grainger, trying for temperateness, “I happen to know her. She is anything but a pleasure-seeker, anything but frivolous, anything, above all, but a pagan. If Palairet had been lucky enough to marry her it would have been the best thing that ever happened to him in his life, and a very dubious thing for her. She is a thousand times too good for him.”
“My dear Mr. Grainger, pardon me; I had no idea that you knew the lady. But,” Mr. Best had flushed a little under this onslaught, “I cannot but think you a partisan.”
“Do you call a woman frivolous who spends half of her time working in the slums?”
“That is a phase, I hear, of the ultra-smart young woman. But no doubt rumor has been unjust. I must beg you to pardon me.”