“Hm!” said Thorpe, and pondered the paternal statement. “I see what you mean,” he remarked at last. “Yes—I see.”
The General preserved silence for what seemed a long time, deferring to the reverie of his host. When finally he offered a diversion, in the form of a remark about the hour, Thorpe shook himself, and then ponderously rose to his feet. He took his hat and coat from the waiter, and made his way out without a word.
At the street door, confronting the waning foliage of the Embankment garden, Kervick was emboldened to recall to him the fact of his presence. “Which way are you going?” he asked.
“I don't know,” Thorpe answered absently. “I think—I think I'll take a walk on the Embankment—by myself.”
The General could not repress all symptoms of uneasiness. “But when am I to see you again?” he enquired, with an effect of solicitude that defied control.
“See me?” Thorpe spoke as if the suggestion took him by surprise.
“There are things to be settled, are there not?” the other faltered, in distressed doubt as to the judicious tone to take. “You spoke, you know, of—of some employment that—that would suit me.”
Thorpe shook himself again, and seemed by an effort to recall his wandering attention. “Oh yes,” he said, with lethargic vagueness—“I haven't thought it out yet. I'll let you know—within the week, probably.”
With the briefest of nods, he turned and crossed the road. Walking heavily, with rounded shoulders and hands plunged deep in his overcoat pockets, he went through the gateway, and chose a path at random. To the idlers on the garden benches who took note of him as he passed, he gave the impression of one struggling with nausea. To his own blurred consciousness, he could not say which stirred most vehemently within him, his loathing for the creature he had fed and bought, or his bitter self-disgust.
The General, standing with exaggerated exactness upon the doorstep, had followed with his bulging eyes the receding figure. He stood still regarding the gateway, mentally summarizing the events of the day, after the other had vanished. At last, nestling his chin comfortably into the fur of his collar, he smiled with self-satisfaction. “After all,” he said to himself, “there are always ways of making a cad feel that he is a cad, in the presence of a gentleman.”