"I must run away," said Bowdon, "or I shall keep my wife waiting for dinner."
"And I must go and dress, or I shall keep Mr. Jewett waiting for dinner."
They parted with no more exchange of confidence than lay in the hint of a half-bitter smile. Lord Bowdon walked home to Queen's Gate, meditating on the Developments and Manifestations of the Modern Spirit. He yielded to fashion so far as to shape his phrase in this way and to affix mental capital letters to the dignified words. But in truth he was conscious that the affair was a very old one, that there had been always a Modern Spirit. In the state of innocency Adam fell, and in the days of villainy poor Jack Falstaff; the case would seem to be much the same with the Modern Spirit. Still there is good in a label, to comfort the consciences of sinners and to ornament the eloquence of saints.
The eloquence of saints was on the lips of his wife that evening when they dined together, and Bowdon listened to it with complete intellectual assent. He could not deny the force of her strictures on Ashley Mead nor the justness of her analysis of Ora Pinsent. But he did not love her in this mood; we do not always love people best when they convince us most. Ashley was terribly foolish, Ora seemed utterly devoid of the instinct of morality, intimated Irene.
"No," said Bowdon, with a sudden undeliberated decisiveness, "that's just what she's got. She hasn't anything else, but she has that."
The flow of Irene's talk was stemmed; she looked across at him with a vexed enquiring air.
"You've not seen anything like so much of her as I have," she objected. "Really I don't see what you can know about it, Frank. Besides men never understand women as women do."
"Sometimes better, and I'm quite right here," he persisted. "Why did she send for her husband?"
"I don't think there was ever any real question of his coming." This remark was not quite sincere.
"Oh, yes, there was," said Bowdon with a smile. The smile hinted knowledge and thereby caused annoyance to his wife. How did he come to know, or to think he knew, so much of Ora? But it was no great thing that had inspired his protest; it was only the memory of how she once said, "Don't."