Then began the game of consequences: the moves of two pieces, one a pawn, the other the knight called Dubby Stewart.
It is a frumpish world, a world where the Frumps, of one or other sex or of neither sex, in one or other of their manifestations, have a great deal to do with the ordering of things. That is why it is politic, for one’s ease, never to ignore the Frumps and never, never to challenge them by an act of gallant defiance such as shying an imitation wedding ring into the waters of Blea Tarn.
Effie held, of course, that since she was in any case defying the Frumps it was honest to defy them in form as well as in substance, but it is only certain kinds of honesty which are the best policy.
The Frump who sat behind Effie at meals at the Inn (her name was Miss Entwistle) had doubted the genuineness of that ring, and when it disappeared her doubts went with it. The hussy, she saw, had realized that her ring deceived nobody, and was brazening it out in the shameless way of hussies.
Women are wicked, but men are only weak; so that, though Miss Entwistle faced Sam at dinner from the next table, it was some days before she could spare her attention from the back of the greater sinner and transfer it to the face of the lesser. She could stare to her heart’s content; it did not matter to Sam, who had only eyes for Effie: and the stare of Miss Entwistle was very persistent indeed. It was rude, but it was also pensive. It seemed to be looking for something it could not find.
She could not place him and was annoyed because she felt certain she had seen him before. She got up early more than once to read the names on the morning’s letters, but did not find one which she could associate with Sam, and came home to Manchester a disappointed woman. Her failure to identify him spoiled her holiday.
But all things come to her who waits, especially, as the world is made, to Frumps, and Miss Entwistle came by the knowledge she craved one afternoon when her friend Mrs. Grandage took her to Ada Branstone’s “At Home.”
The two photographs of Sam in Ada’s drawing-room were intended to sustain her reputation for perfect domesticity. She couldn’t live without him; she drew her very breath from him when he was there, and from his photographs when he was not. And since one was full-face and the other profile, they supplied Miss Entwistle with reliable identification of the sinner of Marbeck.
It was heavenly. Hers was the power and the glory of initiating a scandal, of exploding a bomb—which would certainly disturb the peace of quite a number of people, of figuring in a maelstrom of backbiting tea-parties as the one authentic eyewitness. It was irresistible, besides plain duty to her injured hostess.
The drop of gall in her brimming honey-pot was that she did not know Ada well enough to tell her the secret by herself, but must share the excitement of that first surprise with Mrs. Grandage. She whispered with her friend for some close-packed, hectic moments, and the two ladies stubbornly outstayed the rest of the callers.