Another guest proposed himself! I hoped that the company might always prove harmonious.
"As for Chat," he went on, "I don't want to boast of my conquests—but she's mine."
"My congratulations are untouched by envy."
"You may live to change your mind about that. Anyhow I hold her in my hand."
The truth about him was that, as he loved his strength, so, and no less, he loved the display of it. A common, doubtless not the highest, characteristic of the strong! Display is apt to pass into boast. He was not at all loath to hint to me—to force me to guess—that his encounters in Paris had set him thinking. (If they had set him feeling, he said nothing about that.) Hence—as I reasoned it—he went on, with a trifle more than his usual impudence, "Your goose will be cooked when she marries, though!"
After all, his impudence was good-humored. I retorted in kind. "Perhaps the husband won't let you walk in the park either!"
"If Fillingford were half a man—Lord, what a chance!"
"You gossip as badly as the women themselves. Why not say young Lacey at once?"
"The boy? I'd lay him over my knee—at the first word of it."
"He'd stab you under the fifth rib as you did it."