V
WALLINGFORD and Frothingham developed a warm friendship. Wallingford was extremely suspicious of himself in it, but after a searching self-analysis decided that his liking for the Earl was to a certain extent genuine. “He doesn’t know much—at least, he acts as if he didn’t. But he’s clever in a curious way, and a good listener, and not a bit of a fakir. No doubt he’s on the lookout for a girl with cash, but English ideas on that subject are different from ours—that is, from what ours are supposed to be. He’s a type of English gentleman, and not a bad type of gentleman without any qualification.”
When he expressed some such ideas to Catherine Hollister, at a dance given for her by Mrs. Carnarvon, she went so much further in praise of Frothingham that he laughed. “So that’s the way the wind blows, eh?” he said, grinning at her satirically.
She coloured, and put on the look of an offended saint.
“Countess of Frothingham,” he went on, undisturbed. “That would sound romantic, wouldn’t it? Catherine, Countess of Frothingham!”
“How can you be so coarse-fibred in some ways, Joe, and so fine in others?” she said reproachfully.
“I don’t know, dear lady. I suppose because I’m human—just like you.”
“Let us dance,” was her only reply. She had known Joe so long that she couldn’t help liking him, but he certainly was trying.
Later in the evening, remembering Joe’s cruelty and sordidness, she said to Frothingham: “You don’t know what a pleasure it is to the finer women over here to meet foreign men. They are so much more subtle and sympathetic. They are not coarsened by business. They are not mercenary.”
She raised her dreamy eyes to his as she spoke the word “mercenary,” He reddened and stumbled—they were dancing the two-step. “I wish you wouldn’t look at me like that,” he said, with an ingenuousness wholly unconscious. “It reminds me of my sins, and—and—all that.”