Frothingham removed his monocle, wiped it carefully in a brilliant plaid silk handkerchief, and slowly fitted it in place. Then he sent a mocking, cynical gleam through it at his sister. “You forget,” he drawled, “that I caught you and Georgie kissing each other and crying over each other the day he went off to the States.”
Evelyn flushed. “How does that excuse you?” she demanded, undismayed.
He was silent for a moment, then with tears in his eyes and a break in his habitual cynical drawl, “I can’t go, Eve. I can’t give her up.”
Evelyn’s heart ached, but she did not show it. She simply asked in her usual tone of almost icy calm, “Where’s the cash to come from?”
He collapsed helplessly into a chair. There was no alternative—he must go; he must marry money. He owed it to his family and position; also, he wanted it himself—what is a “gentleman” without money? And—why, if he did not bestir himself he might actually have to go to work! And “what the devil could I work at? I might go out to service—I’d shine as a gentleman’s gentleman—or I might do something as a billiard marker——”
With such dangers and degradations imminent, to think of love was sheer madness. Frothingham sighed and stared miserably through his monocle at the peacocks squawking their nerve-jarring predictions of rain.
II
ON the second day out, in the morning, Frothingham was at the rail, his back to the sea, his glassed gaze roaming aimlessly up and down the row of passengers stretched at full length in steamer chairs. He became conscious of the manœuvrings of a little man in a little grey cap and little grey suit, with little grey side-whiskers that stood out like fins on either side of his little grey face. Each time this little person passed it was with a nervous smile at Frothingham, and a nervous wiping of the lips with the tip of his tongue. When he saw that Frothingham, or, rather, Frothingham’s monocle, was noting him, he halted in front of him. He was too painfully self-conscious to see that the Englishman’s look was about as cordial as that of a bald-headed man watching the circlings of a bluebottle fly.