Mrs. Mancredo meanwhile had not for a moment lost sight of the fact that Reginald had not once glanced toward her; and also that, though he had not changed his dress otherwise, the moss rosebud which he had worn before was gone now. She began to get up a theory about that rosebud. She had before never seen him with a buttonhole bouquet. Once when he had asked her for a flower he had only held it for a while; he hadn’t worn it. In a polite sort of a way, one time with another, she had snubbed Reginald often; but all the same, if he was going to wear rosebuds, she was going to know why and whence. So she watched him. He was not even reading his paper; he was eating, not without interest in the good things before him: he was not enough far gone in his new love for that. But he was so abstracted that he—oh, horrors!—he had deliberately, firmly, kept his clutch on his knife and fork, and, having struck the butt of the handle of each squarely down on the table, he held them points upwards in the air, while he industriously masticated his food and glared, unconscious, into the abysmal beyond.
“There’s his lineage well defined,” said she to herself, determinedly watching him; till he with a start looked directly at her, and she holding his eye, with a quick gesture imitated his attitude, stare and all; and then sinking back in her chair, fanned herself in a pantomimic swoon.
He shook his head across the dining-hall, signifying that he had an account to settle, for that manœuvre. And when he had picked at a grape or two for dessert, she significantly moved back the empty chair at her emptily table, and he came over and sat down with her.
She sniffed the air as he approached.
“I smell a moss rosebud,” said she, raising her fibbingly black eyelashes and fibbing lips towards him.
Reginald had been getting quite bright that afternoon, and he answered to her direct gaze: “You have a perfect nose.” And just as she took in the compliment he went on, explanatorily, “a double-barrelled, back-action nose; a burglarious, lock-picking nose, that can shoot round three spiral staircases, down a back hall and unlock a door, all for the purpose of getting at a moss rosebud that you saw pinned on my lapel two hours ago, and which you don’t see there now! Do you know why you don’t see it there now? I’ll tell you. It is because it is in a little vase beside a copy of Petrarch’s works up in my room.”
Now she dropped her eyes and pushed her chair back.
“All right, my poetical friend. I believed all your parables till you came to a ‘copy of Petrarch’; but there are limits,” said she, and she looked at him in a way which, with the accompanying words and intonation, would have meant in a man’s mouth, “You are lying, and I know it and you know it.”
Reginald had always taken a good deal of this sort of thing from the sort of women produced by society (?), some of whom think it persiflage, and some of whom habitually talk that way because of the habitual state of unfaith in men, which, with or without cause, fills their minds and hearts.
Reginald had never at any time in his life liked this; for with all his arrest of high manhood, no man could truly accuse him of lying, or of dishonor along that line toward males. And as a boy he never did lie to his mother, and as a son he had never lied to his father; and when these jocular accusations first began to meet him from pretty girls’ lips, he disliked them much. But when he saw all the fellows had to take it, he began to think that was “high style,” and that, after all, may be, if women took it for granted that the fellows lied and were bad, and yet still petted them and invited them to their homes, badness might, after all, not be badness, nor lying be lying; and that, may be, one thing was as good as another, all through the catalogue. At any rate, that women seemed to think so and that no one fellow could stand against this tide, even if he wanted to do so. But he always disliked this thing just the same, and never saw the wit of it.