“Rather delicate, wasn’t it, you coming down and taking Stirling’s case off him?”
Edwin smiled idly as he lolled far back in an old easy chair. His two individualities had now merged again into one.
“My boy,” Charlie answered, pausing impressively with his curly head held forward, before dropping into an arm-chair by the stool, “you may take it from me that ‘delicate’ is not the word!”
Edwin nodded sympathetically, perceiving with satisfaction that beneath his Metropolitan mannerism, and his amusing pomposities, and his perfectly dandiacal clothes, Charlie still remained the Sunday, possibly more naïve than ever. This naïveté of Charlie’s was particularly pleasing to him, for the reason that it gave him a feeling of superiority to the more brilliant being and persuaded him that the difference between London and the provinces was inessential and negligible. Charlie’s hair still curled like a boy’s, and he had not outgrown the naïveté of boyhood. Against these facts the fact that Charlie was a partner in a fashionable and dashing practice at Ealing simply did not weigh. The deference which in thought Edwin had been slowly acquiring for this Charlie, as to whom impressive news reached Bursley from time to time, melted almost completely away. In fundamentals he was convinced that Charlie was an infant compared to himself.
“Have a drop?”
“Well, it’s not often I do, but I will to-night. Steady on with the whisky, old chap.”
Each took a charged glass and sipped. Edwin, by raising his arm, could just lodge his glass on the mantelpiece. Charlie then opened his large gun-metal cigarette case, and one match lighted two cigarettes.
“Yes, my boy,” Charlie resumed, as he meditatively blew out the match and threw it on the fire, “you may well say ‘delicate.’ The truth is that if I hadn’t seen at once that Stirling was a very decent sort of chap, and very friendly here, I might have funked it. Yes, I might. He came in just after we’d arrived. So I saw him alone—here. I made a clean breast of it, and put myself in his hands. Of course he appreciated the situation at once; and considering he’d never seen her, it was rather clever of him... I suppose people rather like that Scotch accent of his, down here?”
“They say he makes over a thousand a year already,” Edwin replied. He was thinking. “Is she likely to be coming downstairs? No.”
“The deuce he does!” Charlie murmured, with ingenuous animation, foolishly betraying by an instant’s lack of self-control the fact that Ealing was not Utopia. Envy was in his voice as he continued: “It’s astonishing how some chaps can come along and walk straight into anything they want—whatever it happens to be!”