“Pray do nothing of the kind,” returned Frere, “unless you’ve some better reason than a mere compliance with what you please to term ‘the rules of politeness,’ for they are things I trouble my head about mighty little. Besides,” he added sarcastically, “your new friend, Mr. James Rasper, must have found his way upstairs by this time, I should imagine, and I should be sorry to deprive you of the pleasure of his intellectual conversation, more particularly as you seem to appreciate it so thoroughly.”
“How viciously you said that!” returned Rose, smiling. “But tell me, are you really angry? have I done anything to annoy you? I’m sure it’s most unwittingly on my part, if I have;” and as she spoke she looked so good, and so willing to be penitent for any possible offence, that a man must have had the heart of an ogre to have resisted her. Such a heart, however, Frere appeared to possess, for he answered shortly—
“No, I’ve no fault to find with you. I dare say it may be quite according to the ‘rules of politeness’ to cast off old friends and take up with new ones at a minute’s notice, and be completely engrossed by them, though they may contrive to talk about horses till they prove themselves little better than asses to the mind of an unprejudiced auditor. There is your friend conversing eagerly with Bracy, asking, no doubt, what has become of you.”
“You are very unjust, Mr. Frere,” returned Rose, looking hard at her book and speaking eagerly and quickly. “Mr. Rasper is no friend of mine; I scarcely knew his name till you mentioned it. He sat next me at dinner, and talked to me about horses and galloping over ploughed fields after foxes, till I became so stupid that I had scarcely two ideas left in my head, but of course I was bound to answer him civilly. So much for my new friend, as you call him; what you mean by my casting off old ones I don’t at all know; I have done nothing of the kind that I am aware of.”
“No, you have not,” returned Frere, recalled to his better self by Rose’s harangue; “it is I who am, as you say, unjust and absurd, but the honest truth is that I wanted to talk to you myself. All these good people are bores more or less, none of’em able to converse rationally for five minutes together. I meant to have handed you down to dinner, but that silky, scheming widow got hold of me instead and irritated me with her bland platitudes; and then I heard that idiot prating to you about horses’ legs, and you appeared so well satisfied with him, when I knew that you were one of the few women who could understand and appreciate better things, that altogether I grew savage, and could gladly have punched my own head or any one else’s.”
“It is quite as well Mr. Rasper was on the opposite side of the table to you,” returned Rose, “or you might have carried out your theoretical inclinations by practising on him, and then we should have had a scene.”
Frere looked a little awkward and conscious as he replied—
“Though I am a bear, I am not quite such a savage animal as all that comes to; I do not give the fatal hug unless I am attacked first.”
At this moment Bracy and Mr. Rasper, whose backs were turned towards them, approached within earshot. The latter appeared much excited, and Rose heard him say—
“It’s no use talking, I’ve been grossly insulted, sir, and if you won’t take my message to him, by——— I’ll take it myself, and give him as good as he gave me, or perhaps a little better.”