Germaine was too young, he had been too happy, he was too instinctively kindly, to concern himself with other people's private affairs, save in a wholly impersonal fashion. He had always avoided the hidden, unspoken side of life; when certain secrets were confided to him they dropped quickly out of his mind; ugly gossip passed him by.
Yet now he found himself listening to very ugly gossip; some feeling outside himself, some instinct which for the moment mastered him, made him stay on there, eavesdropping.
For the moment the stream of venom was directed against Mrs. Slade, the pretty, harmless little woman whom he would see within the next hour sitting at his own table. She was one of Bella's special friends, and Oliver had got quite fond of her, the more so that he was well aware that she was in a difficult position, owing to the fact, not of her seeking, or so the Germaines believed, that her husband spent most of his life away from her, abroad.
In this special case, Germaine knew something of the hidden wounds; it was horrible to hear this—this old devil engaged in plucking the scabs from these same wounds, and exposing to her vulgar companion the shifts to which the unfortunate little woman was put. Nay, more, she said certain things concerning Mrs. Slade which, if they were true, or even only half true, made the poor little soul under discussion no fit friend or companion for Germaine's own spotless wife, Bella....
The burden of the old woman's talk was money, how people got money, how they spent money, how they did without money. That was the idea running through all her conversation, although it was, of course, concerned with many uglier things than money.
Had they been men speaking Germaine would have been sufficiently filled with righteous indignation to have found words with which to rebuke, even to threaten them, but they were women, common women, and he felt tongue-tied, helpless.
And then, suddenly, there leapt into the conversation his own name, or rather that of his wife, the woman of whom he felt so exultantly, so selflessly proud. The allusion came in the form of a question, a question spoken in a shrill and odious Cockney accent.
"I should like to see that Mrs. Germaine. I wonder if she ever comes into the Park——"
"Not she! At any rate not on Sunday. Why she'd be mobbed!" snapped out the other.
"You don't say so! Do people run after her as much as that?"