“Hello, Blacklock!” said Langdon, with a quizzical, satirical smile with the eyes only. “It seems strange to see you at such peaceful pursuits.” His glance traveled over me critically—and that was the beginning of my trouble. Presently, he rose, left me alone with her.
“You know Mr. Langdon?” she said, obviously because she felt she must say something.
“Oh, yes,” I replied. “We are old friends. What a tremendous swell he is—really a swell.” This with enthusiasm.
She made no comment. I debated with myself whether to go on talking of Langdon. I decided against it because all I knew of him had to do with matters down town—and Monson had impressed it upon me that down town was taboo in the drawing-room. I rummaged my brain in vain for another and suitable topic.
She sat, and I stood—she tranquil and beautiful and cold, I every instant more miserably self-conscious. When the start for the dining-room was made I offered her my left arm, though I had carefully planned beforehand just what I would do. She—without hesitation and, as I know now, out of sympathy for me in my suffering—was taking my wrong arm, when it flashed on me like a blinding blow in the face that I ought to be on the other side of her. I got red, tripped in the far-sprawling train of Mrs. Langdon, tore it slightly, tried to get to the other side of Miss Ellersly by walking in front of her, recovered myself somehow, stumbled round behind her, walked on her train and finally arrived at her left side, conscious in every red-hot atom of me that I was making a spectacle of myself and that the whole company was enjoying it. I must have seemed to them an ignorant boor; in fact, I had been about a great deal among people who knew how to behave, and had I never given the matter of how to conduct myself on that particular occasion an instant's thought, I should have got on without the least trouble.
It was with a sigh of profound relief that I sank upon the chair between Miss Ellersly and Mrs. Langdon, safe from danger of making “breaks,” so I hoped, for the rest of the evening. But within a very few minutes I realized that my little misadventure had unnerved me. My hands were trembling so that I could scarcely lift the soup spoon to my lips, and my throat had got so far beyond control that I had difficulty in swallowing. Miss Ellersly and Mrs. Langdon were each busy with the man on the other side of her; I was left to my own reflections, and I was not sure whether this made me more or less uncomfortable. To add to my torment, I grew angry, furiously angry, with myself. I looked up and down and across the big table noted all these self-satisfied people perfectly at their ease; and I said to myself: “What's the matter with you, Matt? They're only men and women, and by no means the best specimens of the breed. You've got more brains than all of 'em put together, probably; is there one of the lot that could get a job at good wages if thrown on the world? What do you care what they think of you? It's a damn sight more important what you think of them; as it won't be many years before you'll hold everything they value, everything that makes them of consequence, in the hollow of your hand.”
But it was of no use. When Miss Ellersly finally turned her face toward me to indicate that she would be graciously pleased to listen if I had anything to communicate, I felt as if I were slowly wilting, felt my throat contracting into a dry twist. What was the matter with me? Partly, of course, my own snobbishness, which led me to attach the same importance to those people that the snobbishness of the small and silly had got them in the way of attaching to themselves. But the chief cause of my inability was Monson and his lessons. I had thought I was estimating at its proper value what he was teaching. But so earnest and serious am I by nature, and so earnest and serious was he about those trivialities that he had been brought up to regard as the whole of life, that I had unconsciously absorbed his attitude; I was like a fellow who, after cramming hard for an examination, finds that all the questions put to him are on things he hasn't looked at. I had been making an ass of myself, and that evening I got the first instalment of my sound and just punishment. I who had prided myself on being ready for anything or anybody, I who had laughed contemptuously when I read how men and women, presented at European courts, made fools of themselves—I was made ridiculous by these people who, as I well know, had nothing to back their pretensions to superiority but a barefaced bluff.
Perhaps, had I thought this out at the table, I should have got back to myself and my normal ease; but I didn't, and that long and terrible dinner was one long and terrible agony of stage fright. When the ladies withdrew, the other men drew together, talking of people I did not know and of things I did not care about—I thought then that they were avoiding me deliberately as a flock of tame ducks avoids a wild one that some wind has accidentally blown down among them. I know now that my forbidding aspect must have been responsible for my isolations, However, I sat alone, sullenly resisting old Ellersly's constrained efforts to get me into the conversation, and angrily suspicious that Langdon was enjoying my discomfiture more than the cigarette he was apparently absorbed in.
Old Ellersly, growing more and more nervous before my dark and sullen look, finally seated himself beside me. “I hope you'll stay after the others have gone,” said he. “They'll leave early, and we can have a quiet smoke and talk.”
All unstrung though I was, I yet had the desperate courage to resolve that I'd not leave, defeated in the eyes of the one person whose opinion I really cared about. “Very well,” said I, in reply to him.