“I wish you wouldn’t use that dreadful word,” she said, tears in her eyes, but a certain sting in her voice. “I know it’s all right in England—some of us use it here. But it—every time you or anyone says it I feel as if someone had thrust a horrid-smelling rag under my nose. You don’t mind my saying so, do you, dear?”
“Beg pardon,” he said. “We do use rowdy words nowadays. I’m so accustomed to it I don’t notice.”
Just then up to his ears from the promenade and the crowd gaping at the “new chimpanzees” came a voice: “They’re fighting—look! look! Hasn’t he got an ugly scowl? And she’s almost crying.”
He flushed scarlet and sent a glowering glance down into the crowd. He turned upon Catherine: “Just hear that! They think I’m rowing you. By—beg pardon, but—well—I sha’n’t endure it another instant.” And he rose, brushed past Catherine’s mother and Longview, Honoria and two men hanging over her, and stalked along the aisle down into and through the recognising crowd, and out of the Garden.
The boxes ate greedily of this sensation, and the crowd in the promenade scrambled frantically for the crumbs. It was presently noised round that the Englishman had become angered, had struck someone. Rumour at first said it was Catherine; but the crowd by the use of its legs and eyes, and the boxes by the use of their glasses, learned that this was false. There sat Catherine, calm, absorbed in the ring, applauding the jumpers, and turning now and then to her companions with outbursts of ladylike enthusiasm for some particularly clever performance. However, crowd and boxes saw that the Englishman was gone, felt that he must have gone in anger.
The Longview party stopped at the Waldorf for supper, and Frothingham, calmer and a little embarrassed, joined them. Catherine received him as if nothing had taken place, and the next night they appeared together at the Garden as usual.
Late in the evening she said to him: “I’ve told mother of our engagement. Do you mind, dear?”
“She wishes you to come down to the country with us on Sunday to stay a week or two. It is beautiful there, and we shall be very quiet. Shall you like that?”
“And I may speak to your father?” he asked. “In my country it wouldn’t be regarded as honourable for me to act as I’ve been acting with you. I can’t help feeling uncomfortable because I’ve said nothing to your father.”