"I know," said Irene, forgetting her former dialectical championship of Bertie. The matter was serious now. "She needn't have taken quite such an extreme remedy; but he was on the spot, you see; and—and it's the business. She's falling right back into the business, over head and ears and all. It's rather sad, but—" It seemed as though she meant that it was better than linking fortunes with a being all fits and starts. She rose and came near him. "I think we're just about right, you and I, Frank," she said. "We aren't Jewetts and we aren't Oras. I think we're the happy compromise."
"You are, no doubt, my dear. I'm a dull dog," said Bowdon.
She looked at him for a moment and turned away with a little sigh. The marriage was very near; was the work yet fully done, or had fits and starts still their power over him and their attraction for him? He made a remark the next moment which vexed her intensely.
"Well, you know," he said with a thoughtful smile, "I expect we seem to Miss Pinsent just what Jewett seems to us."
Irene walked away and sat down in a chair on the other side of the room.
"I'm sure I don't care what I seem to Ora Pinsent," she said very coldly; but Bowdon smoked on in pensive silence.
At this time both the triumph and the activity of Babba Flint were great. He was divided between the masterpiece of dramatic writing at whose birth he was assisting, and the masterpiece of prescience which he had himself displayed touching the matter of Mr. Fenning's return. When he contemplated these two achievements (and he took almost as much personal credit for the first as for the second) he said openly that he ought to find excuse for being "a bit above himself." It was no use to tell him that he was not writing the play, and neither of the men who knew chose to tell him that he had been wrong in regard to Jack Fenning. Thus left to a blessed self-conceit, he obtruded on Ashley Mead certain advice which was received with a curious bitter amusement.
"If I were you, I'd find out something about the fellow," he said. "I mean—why didn't he come?" He looked very sly. "Cherchez la femme," he added.
"And if I found her?" asked Ashley.
"Oh, well, you know best about that," said Babba. He conceded that it was entirely for Ashley to say whether he would greet a chance of establishing his relations with Ora on a regular and respectable basis. "But, depend on it, she's there," he added, waving his hand in the supposed direction of the United States.