“You look as though a little stimulant would do you no harm,” observed Howarth, busily attentive with the cigarettes.
“Without it, I shan’t last till sundown,” returned the woman. “Never have I spent such a half hour . . . and never again!”
“Difficult, eh?” asked Sullivan.
“Impossible! Why, Uncle Rufus, that man’s not human! Heaven knows, I’m not a vain woman,” she declared, “but for all the notice he took of me, he might have been a graven image, or I might have been one of the shrieking sisterhood! There wasn’t a smile . . . there wasn’t a flicker of response! I kept thinking all the time of Congreve, and his Lady Wishfort trying to captivate that stupid ass, old Mirabell!” Her full voice trembled with excitement and anger. Into her cheeks flooded a wave of natural colour, beneath their expertly applied rouge. “I’m through . . . I’m through,” she cried. “He made me think of a eunuch contemplating a statue of Venus!”
CHAPTER 13.
Mrs. Pratt stood in the hard glitter of too many electric lights, in a hard, encrusted green gown, and greeted her guests with a hard, set smile that froze any budding sense of enjoyment they may have brought with them. Maude was silent and sullen. She had caught the backwash of her mother’s ill-temper throughout two trying weeks, and the party had become a nightmare to her. Augustus, miserable in his evening clothes, and perspiring under the weight of admonitions that warred with his sense of hospitality, watched her in a passion of sympathy. After a succession of violent scenes, he was dolorously conscious that he and Maude together, were no match for the determined woman whom he had meekly followed to the altar.
“She’s got too damned much gulp,” he thought to himself, wondering how to reduce this hampering characteristic in his daughter.
A vigorous jab in the side reminded him that something was amiss. “Eh, my dear?” he whispered. “What’s wrong?”
“Take your hands out of your pockets, Augustus,” hissed Mrs. Pratt, “and don’t you dare to call Dr. Prendergast, ‘Doc’!”
“Doctor and Missus Bzen-an-Bza-a!” announced Cr’ymer, from the door.