“I’m not welcome, I know,” said Feo, “but I thought you might like me to come and tell you what happened to-night, Arthur.”
Fallaray turned, but did not look at her. “Thanks so much,” he said. “Yes. You’re very kind. I’m afraid you’ve been pretty badly bored.”
She echoed the word, giving it all its dictionary interpretations and some which are certainly not in any dictionary.
“When I see those people,” she said, “I marvel at our ever having got through the War. Well, the end of it is that I am to ask you to reconsider your attitude. The argument is that your secession puts them into the cart just at a moment when they think, rightly or wrongly, that they are forcing the fear of God into the Sinn Feiners. They can’t imagine that my influence with you is absolutely nil, because they have the bourgeois idea of marriage and think that because two people are tied together by Church and law they must of necessity be in full sympathy. So all I can do is to make my report and add on my own account that I never saw such a set of petty opportunists in all my career.”
Lytham gave her a match for the cigarette that she had put into a black holder with a narrow band of diamonds. “Did you give them any views of your own?” he asked.
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.
“Rather,” she said, the light on her hair like moonlight on black water. “I held forth at length with my back to the fireplace. As a matter of fact, quite on the spur of the moment, I handed them a very brilliant idea.”
“Yes?” It was a little incredulous.
“Yes, odd as it very obviously seems to you, Lochinvar. I said that I thought that this was the psychological moment for a nice piece of theatricality. I said that some one, probably Kipling, should draft a letter for the King, in which he should set forth the fact that he was going to withdraw every one of his soldiers and all his officials from Ireland at once and leave the Irish to run themselves, giving them the same kind of dominion government that they have in Australia and Canada, wishing them Godspeed and a happy Easter,—a manly, colloquial letter, very simple and direct, and ending with a touch of real emotion, the sort of thing that the King would write on his own, better than any one.”