Monty Askew sat down on a doorstep and wept bitterly:
“The injustice of it!” he sobbed—“the injustice of it!”
Thus Montagu Askew, blaming the high gods. Thus, as always, dragging the innocent into his quarrels.
As Sim Crittenden walked into the lamp-lit dusk with Polly, he said, punching the palm of his left with the great fist of the right:
“I’m so happy, Polly, old girl—I have been dying to hit something all this afternoon.”
CHAPTER XCI
Wherein the Heir of the Ffolliotts falls the Victim to a Limited Badinage
It was the First-Night of an historic Shakespeare revival; and the theatre of the Lyceum was emptying its fashionable crowd of richly dressed women and men into the garrulous murk of the noisy night. The upturned faces of the gaping crowd, that stood along the great portico in the yellow haze of the street, gazed with serious admiration at the glowing splendour that enveloped the fashionable and the rich—the solemn intentness of their unspoken admiration rippling now and again into a good-natured grin upon some street-wag’s sally at the wrinkles of a lean dowager or the comic aspect of an over-plump matron or plain daughter or inane youth or the dozen and one whimsical aspects of things that catch the rambling humour of the people.