He yielded to her caresses in silence. He remembered that Helen had used this same phrase.
"Women always appeal to one's best self," he commented inly, with a mental shrug, "which means a man's inclination to do whatever a woman asks of him."
But he kissed his wife's lips, and said, tolerantly:
"We will talk it over some other time, my dear. We are both tired to-night. But you are right, I suppose, as you always are."
And she loosened her arms from his neck, recognizing that he had put her appeal aside and waived the whole matter.
XXIX.
A NECESSARY EVIL.
Julius Caesar; ii.—2.
At the St. Filipe Club, somewhere in the small hours of that same night, half-a-dozen members were lingering. One was at the piano, recalling snatches from various composers, the air being clouded alike with music and smoke wreaths.
"I think you fellows are hard on Fenton," the musician protested, in response to some remark of Ainsworth's. "I don't see what he's done to make you all so down on him."
"It isn't any thing that he has done," Tom Bently replied, "it is what he has become. He has developed an entirely new side of his nature, and a deucedly unpleasant one, too."