At breakfast Mr. Gifford asked him:—
“Shall I give you some tongue?”
Looking around with the air of one saying a good thing, he replied:—
“Thank you, I have enough of my own.”
The silence was painful. Mr. Gifford looked as if he had lost a near friend. Mrs. Gifford at length, remembering that Hunt was a guest, forced a momentary, ghastly smile. Annie was looking melancholy enough before, but a slight compression of the lips indicated that she had received the full effect. Certain degrees of badness in jokes stamp the joker as a natural inferior in the eyes of even the most rabid of social levelers. Scarcely any possible exhibition of depravity gives quite the sickening sense of disappointment in the perpetrator imparted by a genuinely bad or stale joke. Two or more similar sensations coming near together are multiplied by mutual reverberations so as to be much more impressive than if they occurred at considerable intervals. Hunt's tongue joke not only retroacted to deepen the impression of vulgarity which his last evening's performance had given Annie, but in turn was made to appear a far more significant indication of his character on account of its sequence to that display.
That evening he made her a little present, having selected as a gift a book of the day of which he had chanced to overhear her express to a third person a particularly cordial detestation. It was decidedly the best book of the year, he said; he had read it himself. She was obliged to thank him for it, and even to tell one or two polite fibs, which wrenched her terribly, and the memory of which lent a special spite to the vehemence with which she threw the book into a corner on reaching her room. Then she went remorsefully and picked it up again, and after holding it awhile irresolutely, proceeded to hide it away in a far corner of one of the least used drawers of her bureau.
Not sleeping very well that night, she came downstairs next morning just as Hunt was leaving. He kissed his hand to her and called out “Aw revore.” At first she was merely puzzled, and smiled, and then it occurred to her that it was doubtless the barbarous way he pronounced au revoir, and the smile gave place to an expression of slight nausea. As Hunt well knew, her pet aversion was people who lugged mispronounced French phrases into their conversation under the impression that they imparted a piquant and graceful effect. It was a touch of vulgarity which inspired her with a violent contempt absurdly disproportioned to the gravity of the offense. It had always been a cherished theory of hers that there were certain offenses in manners which were keys to character. If persons committed them, it implied an essential strain of vulgarity in their dispositions. Judged by this theory, where would her lover come out?
Hunt managed to get into a political discussion with Mr. Gifford at table that noon, talking in a rather supercilious tone, and purposely making several bad blunders, which Mr. Gifford corrected rather pointedly. Annie could not help observing that her lover's conceit and ignorance of the subjects discussed seemed about equal.
“How do you like your book?” he asked that evening.
She murmured something confusedly.