“Oh, you must. I can’t stand the deception. You can do it beautifully. Make her laugh: I can’t do that.”
“Oh, very well. All right. If you wish it, but—Jove! I was enjoying my incognito! I’ve taken on a sort of new soul. All my instincts say to keep it.”
He looked at her for permission to go on keeping it.
“No,” she shook her head. “My instinct says, no.”
At that moment Walter slid off the trunk and stared hard at a black trunk marked with a prodigious white letter, swirling around in mid-air. The letter turned out to be “M,” but it took him a moment or two to decide.
“Jove!” Richard exclaimed again; “I must! It’s part of the cure.” He nodded towards Walter. “The only reason he listens to me is because he thinks I’m a bad man like himself. I’m travelling about under an alias,” he lowered his voice; “he thinks he has me in his power. We talked it all over and swore each other to secrecy. He’ll be talking about a percentage of the swag soon! Oh, it wouldn’t do! We must leave things as they are. Don’t you see my point?”
She did, but reluctantly. Walter came back to his perch before she could reply; and a banging trunk, turned end over end by the American system of porterage, stopped all conversation temporarily.
The incident at Naples was a trivial thing, now that she could look back upon it. Why had she not told the mother the whole episode, omitting nothing, on the very evening of the happening? Why had she feared to own up? Here was another of those “mental facts” which Richard was so curious about. Mother would have looked at her with mild disapproval and then, probably, would have laughed at the whole affair. But instead of being frank, Geraldine had been secretive; she had literally created a situation that had had no real existence. She had made a mountain out of a little Neapolitan mole-hill. The evil lay not in tripping off with an unintroduced male but in the careful and prolonged system of concealment. It is easy to see life in review; why cannot we be equally wise in the midst of events?
When she propounded this mental obtuseness to Richard he was full of illustrations to show how common is that human experience. But he was glad it had happened. It gave him a medley of new sensations; and here he was, finding his greatest adventure at the end of his adventure-seeking journey! Of that she was glad too, she said. And he was glad she was glad; for he admitted that he had become attached to the Wells family like a mongrel dog.
“First you are a hound and now you are a mongrel dog!”