What more was to be said? He hesitated with this brief challenge in his hand, was minded to telegraph it and thought of James’s novel, In the Cage. Telegraph operators are only human after all. He determined upon a special messenger and rang up his quarter valet—he shared service in his flat—to despatch it.
The messenger boy got back from Putney that evening about half-past eight. He brought a reply in pencil.
“My dear Friend,” she wrote. “You have been so good to me, so helpful. But I do not think that is possible. Forgive me. I want so badly to think and here I cannot think. I have never been able to think here. I am going down to Black Strand, and in a day or so I will write and we will talk. Be patient with me.”
She signed her name “Ellen”; always before she had been “E. H.”
“Yes,” cried Mr. Brumley, “but I want to know!”
He fretted for an hour and went to the telephone.
Something was wrong with the telephone, it buzzed and went faint, and it would seem that at her end she was embarrassed. “I want to come to you now,” he said. “Impossible,” was the clearest word in her reply. Should he go in a state of virile resolution, force her hesitation as a man should? She might be involved there with Mrs. Harman, with all sorts of relatives and strange people....
In the end he did not go.
§3
He sat at his lunch alone next day at one of the little tables men choose when they shun company. But to the right of him was the table of the politicians, Adolphus Blenker and Pope of the East Purblow Experiment, and Sir Piper Nicolls, and Munk, the editor of the Daily Rectification, sage men all and deep in those mysterious manipulations and wire-pullings by which the liberal party organization was even then preparing for itself unusual distrust and dislike, and Horatio Blenker was tenoring away after his manner about a case of right and conscience, “Blenking like Winking” was how a silent member had put it once to Brumley in a gust of hostile criticism. “Practically if she marries again, she is a pauper,” struck on Brumley’s ears.