An Autumn Sowing

by E. F. Benson

‘May I just say something to you before we begin?’ she said. ‘You may think it a great impertinence, but it is not meant impertinently.’

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘I beg you to call the boy back, and not send that note,’ she said. ‘I hate to think of your doing that. It isn’t the act of——’

She stopped suddenly. He easily supplied the rest of her sentence.

‘It isn’t the act of a gentleman,’ he said. ‘But they’ve just told me that I’m not one, or they would have elected me. They will like to know how right they are.’

He paused a moment.

‘I am sure you did not mean an impertinence, Miss Propert,’ he added, ‘but I think you have committed one.’

‘I am very sorry then,’ said she.

‘Yes. We will get on with the shorthand, please.’

Keeling seldom wasted thought or energy on irremediable mischances: if a business proposition turned out badly he cut his loss on it, and dismissed it from his mind. But it was equally characteristic of him to strike, and strike hard, if opportunity offered at any firm which had let him in for his loss, and, in this case, since the Club had hit at him, he felt it was but fair that he should return the blow with precise and instantaneous vigour. That was right and proper, and his rejoinder to Norah that the Club who did not consider him sufficient of a gentleman to enter their doors should have the pleasure of knowing how right they were, had at least as much sober truth as irony about it. The opportunity to hit back was ready to hand; it would have been singular indeed, and in flat contradiction to his habits, if he had not taken it. But when once he had done that, he was satisfied; they did not want him as a member, and he did not want them as tenants, and there was the end of it. Yet, like some fermenting focus in his brain, minute as yet, but with the potentiality of leaven in it, was the fact that Norah had implored him not to send his answer to Lord Inverbroom. He still considered her interference an impertinence, but what stuck in his mind and began faintly to suggest other trains of thought was the equally undeniable fact that she had not meant it as an impertinence. In intention it had been a friendly speech inspired by the good-will of a friend. But he shrugged his shoulders at it: she did not understand business, or, possibly, he did not understand clubs. So be it then: he did not want to understand them.