“It’s true ... what Jimmy said.”
And again there was a silence in which Clarence flushed slowly a deep red.
“We can speak of such things ... man to man,” continued the torturer and slowly there swept over Clarence a terrible sense of becoming involved. Life in the Babylon Arms in the midst of a great and teeming city was simple compared to the complications of these last few days.
“But it doesn’t seem to make any difference,” he said presently. “All the Town has gone to the ball.... I saw the carriages going there ... a whole stream of them, and it’s Lily Shane who is giving it.”
For an instant, Harvey Seton remained silent, turning the worn cigar round and round in his thin lips, as if it might be the very thought he was turning over in much the same fashion in his own devious mind. “Yes,” he replied, after a long time. “That’s true. But it’s because nobody really knows.”
At this speech Clarence, moved perhaps by the memory of Lily leaning from the window of the cab as she drove off through the storm, asked, “But do you know?”
Slowly his host eyed him with suspicion. It was as if the veiled accusations contained in their depths had suddenly become defined, specific; as if he accused this model young man opposite him of being the father of the vague and suppositious child.
“I have no proofs ... to be sure,” he said. “But a woman, like that.... Well, to look at her is enough. To look at her in her fine Paris clothes. A woman has no right to make herself a lure to men. It’s like the women of the streets.” Then he added gruffly with a sudden glance at the dying fire, “She’s always been bad. They’re a bad lot ... the whole family, unstable, not to be relied upon. They go their crazy way ... all of ’em. Why there was Sam Barr, Lily Shane’s uncle, who spent his whole life inventing useless things ... never making a cent out of ’em. His daughter lives in a cheap boarding house now.... If he’d made an honest living instead of mooning about.” He laughed scornfully. “Why, he even thought he could invent a perpetual motion machine.” Then he halted abruptly as if he realized that he had protested too much, and returned to the main stream of his discourse. “As for the Town going to the ball, all the Town knows just what I know, and they talk about it, only they see fit to ignore it to-night because there is music and good food and champagne punch at Shane’s Castle.”
In the silence that followed Clarence bent his neatly brushed head and slipped away into a world of philosophy new and strange to him. “Yes,” he found himself thinking, “the world is like that and nobody can change it much. If Lily Shane had asked you, you would have gone.”
But in this he was unfair to his enemy; Skinflint Seton would not have gone, because he would have taken too great a satisfaction in refusing. It was this satisfaction, undoubtedly, which he now missed so bitterly.