He paused to glance across the table at Olwen, gaily chattering with Mr. Ellerton.
"It don't matter what woman," pursued the young Staff-officer inexorably. "Any woman. If he's keen before, that chokes him dead off. He's not out for any of this Love-with-a-capital-L business that women are such nuts on. Once he's done the chasing, he's gotten all he wants out of it, I guess. Man's a hunter, Mrs. Cartwright."
"I know," cooed his hostess. Inwardly she exclaimed, "Dear Ass!... But is he going on like this for the whole of my party?"
Up to then Captain Ross had only spoken to her and to the other young Scotsman whom he had brought with him. At Olwen he had simply glowered. At Miss van Huysen on the other side he had not looked.
"What's Love?" he continued, still to Mrs. Cartwright. "It's an amusement. That's what it ought to be. An Episode. It's the Women who insist on spoiling it; taking it seriously. Nothing in this world is worth taking seriously; barring a man's job.... What's woman? The Plaything of Man. And what's Marriage?"
It was, as he pronounced it, a word of one syllable.
"Marriage," he answered his own question, "is an idea that the sensible man looks at from every angle, and then cuts right out until he can't find anything better to do. If he is really a sensible man, he invariably can find it."
"Ah," uttered Mrs. Cartwright with the little appreciative laugh of one who hears for the first time an original thought brilliantly phrased.
But she wanted to be soothing; she was fond of Captain Ross. One does not sob out one's weakness on a man's shoulder once and think of him as a stranger thereafter. She had asked him to forget. She never forgot....
A pity he'd come in this absurd mood, she thought.