“I believe I could think better if I had Ricoletto,” he cried a moment later, jumping up and leaving the room. Nance took the opportunity of blowing every trace of cigarette-ash from her strawberry plate into the fender. She had hardly done this and demurely tucked herself up again in her chair when Mr. Traherne re-entered the room carrying in his hands a large white rat.
“Beautiful, isn’t he?” he remarked, offering the animal for the girl to stroke. “I love him. He inspires me with all my sermons. He pities the human race, don’t you, Ricoletto? And doesn’t hate a living thing except cats. He has a seraphic temper and no wish to marry. Ankles are nothing to him—are they, Ricoletto?—but he likes potatoes.”
As he spoke the priest brushed aside a heap of papers and laid bare the half-gnawed skin of one of these vegetables.
“Come, darling!” he said, reseating himself in his chair and placing rat and potato-skin together upon his shoulder, “enjoy yourself and give me wisdom to defeat the wiles of all the devils. Devils are cats, Ricoletto darling, great, fluffy, purring cats with eyes as big as saucers.”
Nance quietly went on eating strawberries and thinking to herself how strange it was that with every conceivable anxiety tugging at her heart she could feel such a sense of peace.
“He’s a papistical rat,” remarked Mr. Traherne, “he likes incense.”
Once more he relapsed into profound thought and Ricoletto’s movements made the only sound in the room.
“What you want, my child,” he began at last, while the girl put her plate down on the table and hung upon his words, “is lodgings for yourself and Linda in the village. I know an excellent woman who’d take you in—quite close to Miss Pontifex and not far from our dear Raughty. In fact, she’s the woman who cleans Fingal’s rooms. So that’s all in her favour! Fingal has a genius for getting nice people about him. You like Fingal, Nance, eh? But I know you do, and I know,” and the priest made the most outrageous grimace, “I know he adores you. You’re perfectly safe, let me tell you, with Fingal, my dear; however, he may tease you. He’s a hopeless heathen but he has a heart of gold.”
Nance nodded complete assent to the priest’s words. She smiled, however, to herself to think what a little way this “safety” he spoke of would go if by chance her heart were not so entirely preoccupied. She couldn’t resist the thought of how pathetically like children all these admirable men were, both in their frailties and in their struggles against their frailties. Her sense of peace and security grew upon her, and with this—for she was human—a delicate feeling of feminine power. Mr. Traherne continued—