There was no answer. He put a white silk muffler round his neck to protect his collar.
"Oh, look at his initials in lavender silk!"
At last he was in his overcoat, and in the street with the bevy.
"Leave your overcoat open, so it shows your shirt-front as you walk," said Grace, forcibly unbuttoning the said coat. "I think that looks so lovely. Doesn't he look lovely, Monica? Everybody will be asking who he is."
"Tell them he's the son of General Grant," said Aunt Matilda, with complete satisfaction, as she sailed at his side.
Life is principally a matter of endurance. This was the sum of Jack's philosophy. He put it into practice this evening.
It was a benefit concert in the Town Hall, with the Episcopalian Choir singing, "Angels Ever Bright and Fair," and a violinist from Germany playing violin solos, and a lady vocalist from Melbourne singing "home" solos, while local stars variously coruscated. Aunt Matilda filled up the end of the seat—like a massive book-end: and the others like slender volumes of romance were squeezed in between her and another stout book-end. Jack had the heaving warmth of Aunt Matilda on his right, the electric wriggle of Monica on his left, and he continued to breathe red-hot air.
The concert was a ludicrous continuation of shameful and ridiculous noise to him. Each item seemed inordinately long and he hoped for the next, which when it came, seemed worse than the last. The people who performed seemed to him in a ghastly humiliating position. One stout mother-of-thousands leaned forward and simply gurgled about riding over the brow of a hill and seeing a fair city beyond, and a young knight in silver armour riding toward her with shining face, to greet her on the spot as his lady fair and lady dear. Jack looked at her in pained amazement. And yet when the songs-tress from Melbourne, in a rich contralto, began to moan in a Scotch accent:
"And it's o-o-oh! that I'm longing for my ain folk,
Though the-e-ey be but lowly, puir and plain folk—
I am far across the sea
But my heart will ever be-e-e-e-e
At home in dear old Scotland with my ain folk,"
Jack suddenly wanted to howl. He had never been to Scotland and his father, General Grant, with his mother, was at present in Malta. And he hadn't got any "ain folk," and he didn't want any. Yet it was all he could do to keep the tears from showing in his eyes, as his heart fairly broke in him. And Aunt Matilda crowded him a little more suffocatingly on the right, and Monica wriggled more hatefully than ever on the left, and that beastly Mary leaned forward to glance appreciatively at him, with her low-down black eyes. And he felt as if the front of his body was scorched. And a smouldering desire for revenge awoke deep down in him.