“Yes—? I dare say,” Kathleen assented vaguely. “This herring is really very good, Felix. I think you would like it, if you just had not made up your mind to be stubborn about it—” Then she spoke with new animation: “Felix, Margaret Woods was in Louvet’s yesterday morning, having her hair done for a dinner they gave the railroad crowd last night, and of all the faded washed-out looking people I ever saw—! And I can remember her having that hideous brown dress long before she was married. Of course, it doesn’t make any difference to me that she didn’t see fit to invite us. She was one of your friends, not mine. I was only thinking that, since she always pretended to be so fond of you, it does seem curious the way we are invariably left out.”
So Kennaston did not embroider verbally his theme—of Living Adequately—as he had felt himself in vein to do could he have found a listener.
“Some day,” he ruefully reflected, “I shall certainly write a paper upon The Lost Art of Conversing with One’s Wife. Its appeal, I think, would be universal.”
Then his eggs came....
VII
Peculiar Conduct of a Personage
SHORTLY afterward befell a queer incident. Kennaston, passing through a famed city, lunched with a personage who had been pleased to admire Men Who Loved Alison, and whose remunerative admiration had been skilfully trumpeted in the public press by Kennaston’s publishers.
There were some ten others in the party, and Kennaston found it droll enough to be sitting at table with them. The lean pensive man—with hair falling over his forehead in a neatly-clipped “bang,” such as custom restricts to children—had probably written that morning, in his official capacity, to innumerable potentates. That handsome bluff old navy-officer was a national hero: he would rank in history with Perry and John Paul Jones; yet here he sat, within arms’-reach, prosaically complaining of unseasonable weather. That bearded man, rubicund and monstrous as to nose, was perhaps the most powerful, as he was certainly the most wealthy, person inhabiting flesh; and it was rumored, in those Arcadian days, that kingdoms did not presume to go to war without securing the consent of this financier.
And that exquisitely neat fellow, looking like a lad unconvincingly made-up for an octogenarian in amateur theatricals, was the premier of the largest province in the world: his thin-featured neighbor was an aeronaut—at this period really a rara avis—and went above the clouds to get his livelihood, just as ordinary people went to banks and offices. And chief of all, their multifarious host—the personage, as one may discreetly call him—had left unattempted scarcely any rôle in the field of human activities: as ranchman, statesman, warrior, historian, editor, explorer, athlete, coiner of phrases, and re-discoverer of the Decalogue, impartially, he had labored to make the world a livelier place of residence; and already he was the pivot of as many legends as Charlemagne or Arthur.
The famous navy-officer, as has been said, was complaining of the weather. “The seasons have changed so, since I can remember. We seem to go straight from winter into summer nowadays.”