Henry was nearly an hour later than usual in arriving home, but he offered no explanation to his mother and aunt beyond saying that he had been detained by a caller, after Sir George's departure. He read in the faces of his mother and aunt their natural pride that he should be capable of conducting Sir George's business for him after Sir George's departure of a night. Yet he found himself incapable of correcting the false impression which he had wittingly given. In plain terms, he could not tell the ladies, he could not bring himself to tell them, that a well-dressed young woman had called upon him at a peculiar hour and interviewed him in the strict privacy of Sir George's own room on behalf of a lady's paper called Home and Beauty. He wanted very much to impart to them these quite harmless and, indeed, rather agreeable and honourable facts, but his lips would not frame the communicating words. Not even when the talk turned, as of course it did, to Love in Babylon, did he contrive to mention the interview. It was ridiculous; but so it was.
'By the way——' he began once, but his mother happened to speak at the same instant.
'What were you going to say, Henry?' Aunt Annie asked when Mrs. Knight had finished.
'Oh, nothing. I forget,' said the miserable poltroon.
'The next advertisement will say twentieth thousand, that's what it will say—you'll see!' remarked Mrs. Knight.
'What an ass you are!' murmured Henry to Henry. 'You'll have to tell them some time, so why not now? Besides, what in thunder's the matter?'
Vaguely, dimly, he saw that Miss Foster's tight-fitting bodice was the matter. Yes, there was something about that bodice, those teeth, that tongue, that hair, something about her, which seemed to challenge the whole system of his ideas, all his philosophy, self-satisfaction, seriousness, smugness, and general invincibility. And he thought of her continually—no particular thought, but a comprehensive, enveloping, brooding, static thought. And he was strangely jolly and uplifted, full of affectionate, absent-minded good humour towards his mother and Aunt Annie.
There was a ting-ting of the front-door bell.