A Gray Eye or So. In Three Volumes—Volume II

by Frank Frankfort Moore

As she said good-night to him, she seemed, Edmund Airey thought, to be a trifle fascinated as well as fascinating. He felt that he had had a delightful hour—it was far more delightful than the half hour which he had passed on the settee at the rear of the skeleton elk.

His feeling in this matter simply meant that it was far more agreeable to him to see a young woman admiring his cleverness than it was to admire the cleverness of another young woman.

He enjoyed his smoke by the side of the judge; for when a man is absorbed in the thoughts of his own cleverness he can still get a considerable amount of passive enjoyment out of the story of How the Odds fell from Thirteen to Five to Six to Four against Porcupine for some prehistoric Grand National.

Harold Wynne now and again glanced across the hall at the man who professed to be his best friend. He could perceive without much trouble that Edmund Airey was particularly well pleased with himself.

This meant, he thought, that Edmund had been particularly well pleased with Beatrice Avon.

Lord Fotheringay was too deeply absorbed in giving point to a story, founded upon personal experience, which he was telling to his host, to give a moment’s attention to Edmund Airey, or to make an attempt to interpret his aspect.

It was only when his valet was putting him carefully to bed—he required very careful handling—that he recollected the effective way in which Airey had snubbed him, when he had made an honest attempt to reach Miss Avon conversationally.

He now found time to wonder what Airey meant by preventing the girl from being entertained—Lord Fotheringay assumed, as a matter of course, that the girl had not been entertained—all the evening. He had no head, however, for considering such a question in all its aspects. He only resolved that in future he would take precious good care that when there was any snubbing in the air, he would be the dispenser of it, not the recipient.

Lord Fotheringay was not a man of genius, but upon occasions he could be quite as disagreeable as if he were. He had studied the art of administering snubs, and though he had never quite succeeded in snubbing a member of Parliament of the same standing as Mr. Airey, yet he felt quite equal to the duty, should he find it necessary to make an effort in this direction.

He was sleeping the sleep of the reprobate, long before his son had succeeded in sleeping the sleep of the virtuous. Harold had more to think about, as well as more capacity of thinking, than his father. He was puzzled at the attitude of his friend and counsellor, Edmund Airey. What on earth could he have meant by appropriating Beatrice Avon, Harold wondered. He assumed that Airey had some object in doing what he had done. He knew that his friend was not the man to do anything without having an object in view. Previously he had been discreet to an extraordinary degree in his attitude toward women. He had never even made love to those matrons to whom it is discreet to make love. If he had ever done so Harold knew that he would have heard of it; for there is no fascination in making love to other men’s wives, unless it is well known in the world that you are doing so. The school-boy does not smoke his cigarette in private. The fascination of the sin lies in his committing it so that it gets talked about.