The letter assumed from the outset a mysterious and melodramatic tone. "Perhaps, finally, she really has something to say," commented Truesdale. But she went on, circling round her theme, dipping down to it now and again, and then soaring up and away from it altogether. "Well," asked Truesdale presently, with a slight show of impatience, "what is it?—something she doesn't fully understand, or something she does understand but can't bring herself to write about? She 'listened,' she says; to very small purpose, say I." He felt one moment that she was more or less in the dark; the next, that she was making passes at some forbidden theme; the third, that she was asking a more ardent recognition of her loyalty and devotion. "She speaks of her 'position,' too. It's 'awkward,' it seems, and 'embarrassing,' and 'dangerous.' It needn't be, though. She made it for herself, and she can unmake it whenever she chooses. Well, I'll try all this again, when I've got more time; it will keep. What is this, though, it says at the end? H'm; I am to remember that if I have enemies I also have fast friends, ever yours sincerely—oh, that's all right." He crammed the sheets into his bureau-drawer, drew on his gloves, selected a stick to his taste, gave himself a last look in the glass, and sauntered out to dinner.
He had discovered a French restaurant within a kilometre of the house, where he could dine à prix fixe in a cabinet particulier for five francs, including a demi-bouteille of ordinaire.
"That's something like," he declared. "That's what I'm used to!" He thought with a shudder of the rest of the family going down to supper in the basement dining-room—that time-honored, semi-subterranean dungeon. "I'm glad, I'm sure, that they are going to have their new dining-room above-ground; for their own sakes, that is to say—not that it will matter the least to me!"
XVI
Truesdale airily waved the remaining coin from the plate to the waiter's pocket and rose to go. He never omitted the giving of a pour-boire; "it helps so much to increase the illusion," he said. The waiters, accordingly, bestowed an exaggerated attention upon his hat and coat, and had developed an almost clinging affection for his stick. They also insisted upon passing things that he could very well reach for himself, and their "bon soir, m'sieu'" was quite unfailing in its regularity. "This shaggy town may have a silver lining, after all," he would think; "but you've got to turn things inside out to find it."
Near the exit Truesdale noticed Theodore Brower sitting with a demi-tasse before him. "Hallo!" he called to Brower, "I didn't know you came here."
"Once in a while," returned Brower. "I shop around. I'm a tramp. I eat anywhere. And I'm getting tired of it, too." He rose. "Give me a lift with this coat and I'll go along with you."
Brower was too incorruptibly native to give a fee; usually therefore, he put on his coat for himself. "Well, what's the programme?" he asked, feeling for his inside sleeves.
"Nothing," said Truesdale; "or anything. Only, I bar law, and philanthropy, and the Complete Letter-writer. What have you got in mind yourself?
"I though of going up to the Consolation Club; this is their night."