She stole a swift glance at him, as she fanned herself. “You surprise me,” she commented. “I should have thought everybody would be running after you.”
“Do they? I am not conscious of it.” He spoke wearily. “If they do, it does not interest me. They are not my kind of people. They take no hold whatever upon my sympathy. They make no appeal to the imagination.”
“You could hardly say that about those ladies’ skirts up there,” she jocosely remarked. “I had no idea silk petticoats flapped so.”
He was not to be diverted from his theme. “It is very funny about me,” he went on. “I seem to make no friends among men, of my own age or any other. Of course there are two or three exceptions—but no more. And as for the majority of women, they attract me still less. Yet when, once in a great while, I do meet some one who really interests me, it is always a woman. These few women whom I have in mind—oh, I could count them on the fingers of one hand—they make a much deeper and more lasting impression on me than any man can make.”
“I believe that frequently happens,” she put in lightly. She did not seem to him to be following his thread of reasoning with conspicuous closeness, but her pleasant smile reassured him.
“I think I am most readily moved on the side of my compassion,” he continued, intent upon the development of his self-analysis. “If I am sorry for the people, it is easier for me to like them—that is, if they are young and pretty women.”
Cora laughed aloud at this, then lapsed abruptly into thoughtfulness. “How do you mean?” she asked.
“To-night I went to the place of the—the promenade—the Empire, is it not? And the sight of the young women there—it terribly affected me. I wanted to shout out that they were all my sisters—that I would protect them all—that they should never be forced by poverty and want to face that miserable humiliation again.” She looked at him, her lips parted over the beautiful teeth, a certain blankness of non-comprehension in the beautiful eyes. As she slowly grasped the drift of his words, the eyes and lips joined in a reserved and baffling smile. “You’re a nice boy,” she decided, “but you’re tremendously young. Those girls are lazy, greedy, good-for-nothing hussies. They wouldn’t do honest work for a living if it was brought to them on a silver salver. They haven’t an idea in their empty painted heads except to wheedle or steal money from drunken fools. They’re nothing but—what d’ye call ’em?—parasites. I’d put ’em all on the treadmill, if I had my way.”
Christian sat up a little, and she was alert in noting the signs of disaffection on his mobile face. “Nevertheless, there is a great sorrow and a great shame in it all,” he said, gravely.
“Oh, that I admit,” she declared, making busy work with her fan. “Of course! Perhaps I spoke more sharply than I meant. Every one is sorry for the poor creatures—but—but I confess I’m sorrier still for the girls who have to work like slaves for the barest necessities of life. Why, my dressmaker’s girls, two of ’em—poor little half-starved sisters who may come at nine or ten o’clock at night to deliver things, or try something on—they get twenty-five shillings a week between them. That’s what gets on my nerve.”