“Assuredly; but you have not repented. That is proved by your own act in coming here quite as much as by anything that Mr. Harding says of you.”
“Harding!” At the mention of the name Brant saw what his enemy had done and went mad accordingly. “Do you mean to say you would listen for a moment to anything that damnable hound could say of me, or of any one?”
Mrs. Langford retreated to the door.
“Pardon me, Mr. Brant, if I leave you—you are merely making a bad matter worse. A gentleman does not so far forget himself as to swear in the presence of a lady. I think we understand each other, and I will bid you good evening.”
When she was gone Brant found his way out of the house, and spent half the night tramping the hills to the westward of the suburb. Under favouring conditions self-respect is a plant of rapid growth, but it is sensitive in inverse proportion to its age. While he was very willing to call himself the chief of sinners, and to deprecate his own temerity in aspiring to a seat at the table of virtue, Brant was no more complaisant under reproach than any Pharisee of us all.
For this cause he filled the hours of the solitary walk afield with bitter revilings heaped upon uncharity in general, and upon social canons as interpreted by the Mrs. Langfords in particular, going finally to his room in a frame of mind in which wrath and desperation far outran grief.
“‘Give a dog a bad name,’” he fumed, flinging hat and overcoat into a corner and lighting the gas and a fresh cigar with the same match. “I might have known what it would come to. And all I asked in the wide world was to be let alone!”
CHAPTER XII
THE WAY OF A MAID WITH A MAN
A fortnight or such a matter after his rebuff in the presence of outraged art—typified by the newly finished “Sunset in Platte Cañon”—and a week after the Draconian episode and Brant’s dismissal by Mrs. Langford, Antrim took Isabel to the opera, meaning to have his answer once for all before he slept.
Another man under similar hard conditions might have hesitated to preface his coup de grace matrimonial with an evening’s amusement; but Antrim was wise in his generation, and he knew Isabel’s leanings well enough to be sure that no other preliminary would add more to his chances of success.