At first, after his parting with Carrie, Phil was inclined to be rather sulky and moody, but when he returned to town with his father, and after he began to attend church with so much regularity, he came to a more Christian frame of mind, and exhibited indeed such a markedly better temper that his father smiled to himself and said all was going well.
Phil now showed no disinclination for society, and indeed entered upon its pleasures with peculiar zest. He even plunged deep into a flirtation—a hopeful sign—with a certain Lady Hester Ware, a pretty, witty young Irishwoman, without a penny to her fortune. Meadowes was delighted; he would have welcomed a daughter of the beggar Lazarus as Phil’s chosen bride at that moment.
With commendable caution he paid not the slightest attention to the affair; for he knew the contradictious human spirit, and Phil flirted on. But at last, when the matter seemed quite an established fact, he expressed to Phil his great admiration for Lady Hester.
‘There’s a clever woman!’ he exclaimed in conclusion. But his breath was taken away by Phil’s response—
‘Clever? yes, deucedly clever. I hate clever women, and if you like ’em, sir, you’re the first man that ever did!’
‘ ’Pon my soul!’ exclaimed Meadowes, with a long whistle of astonishment; then he added severely, ‘If you do not like Lady Hester, Phil, you do very wrong to trifle with her affections, as you have been doing this many a day.’
‘ ’Tis, as you say, sir, an unpardonable sin to play a woman false—may Heaven forbid I should fall into it!’ said Phil in pious tones, and Meadowes, as he met the boy’s bright eyes, turned uneasily away.
Richard Meadowes had, you see, not added this cynical axiom to his collection:—that most men, when desperate about one woman, will plunge into a flirtation with another: so he was at a loss to account for Phil’s conduct, if it was not actuated by admiration.
Phil was not really doing anything extraordinary—he was only trying to find an answer to the question ‘how best to pass two years?’—two years that seemed to him to expand into a lifetime as he looked ahead, for he was of an impatient temperament. Six months had passed before the happy expedient of seeing Carrie at church suggested itself to his mind; and by dint of this device six months more were got over. But with the spring’s return came a crowd of tender remembrances, and Phil grew very sulky and despondent again. His father had gone to Fairmeadowes, but Phil, grown now very emancipated, refused to leave London; ‘The country was dull,’ said he, who aforetime loved it so well. He had come to an end of his flirtation—and the lees of a flirtation are the sourest beverage; he could gain no distraction from it any longer: he was at his wit’s end.
As he walked moodily down the Square one morning about this time, Phil heard his name spoken, and, turning round, found Mr. Simon Prior by his side.