Claire soon became bored. Mr. Diggs was plainly tipsy; Herbert had been right. But he was most uninterestingly tipsy. He had sense enough remaining to conduct himself with a sort of haphazard propriety. He incessantly stroked either one or the other whisker, and kept up a perpetual covert struggle not to appear incoherent. He was at times considerably incoherent; a few of his sentences made the nominative seem as if it were swaggering toward its verb. But he was vastly polite. He told Claire that his wife had fallen in love with her. A little later, however, he spoke of his wife with a certain jolly disparagement.
"Kate is full of a lot of new things. I don't know what I'm going to do with her—really, I don't. She'll be a regular free-thinker before I know it. And I don't like free-thinkers; I think they're a sad lot. Now, don't you?"
Claire gave short, evasive answers to these and a number of similar appeals. Mr. Diggs distressed her; he was not at all the sort of person whom she desired to meet. She soon made herself so intentionally distraite that he rose and told her he was going to smoke a cigar, which he would bring into the sitting-room after he had obtained it, provided she did not object. She professed herself wholly sympathetic with this arrangement, and tried not to let her lip curl as she watched the unsteady pace of its proposer across the long sitting-room.
But he had scarcely retired before Mrs. Diggs broke off her converse with Hollister and exclaimed to Claire:—
"Where on earth has dear Manhattan gone? You don't mean that he has left you? How shameful of him!"
"I believe he has gone to get a cigar," Claire said.
"Oh, a cigar," retorted Mrs. Diggs. "Yes, poor Manhattan is an inveterate smoker." She now looked at Hollister and Claire equally, with quick, alternate movements of the head. "I feel sure that tobacco is beginning to injure him, though it is really a very small kind of vice, don't you know? It saves a man from other worse ones. Manhattan, dear boy, smokes a good deal, and I suppose I should be grateful it's only that. I hear such dreadful tales from my friends about their husbands drinking. I don't know what I should do if dear Manhattan drank. I'm so glad he doesn't. If he did, I—well, I actually believe I should get a divorce!"
Claire felt that her husband's eye, full of merry furtive twinkles, had fixed itself upon her all through this unexpected speech. But she kept her face from the least mirthful betrayal. Mr. Diggs did not come back with his cigar.
Claire now wondered, as she watched her new friend, and entered into conversation with her, whether this unconsciousness of her husband's continual excesses could be real and not feigned. It was hard to suppose that so much shrewd observation and so cunning a recognition of human foibles and follies could by any chance consort with the obtuse lack of perception which her late comments had implied. And yet Claire somehow became conscious that Mrs. Diggs had really meant it all. The anomaly was hard to credit; it was one of those absurd contradictions with which human nature often loves to bewilder us; and yet its element of preposterous self-delusion held at least the merit of being genuine.
Claire had reached a distinct conclusion to this effect, when Mrs. Van Horn, entering the room, paused and looked all about her. There were several other groups scattered here and there, but the lady presently fixed her gaze upon that small one of which Mrs. Diggs was a unit. And very soon afterward she began to move in the direction of her cousin.