“Thank you!” she said, curtly.
The Philosopher felt that he had somehow stumbled into a mistake. His remark was evidently not of a kind that was pleasing to the Sentimentalist. But, like all self-centred, self-opiniated men, he went a little further into the quagmire.
“My remark was meant as a compliment,” he explained, laboriously. “Actresses are the only really successful women nowadays. They are petted and praised and their touched-up glorified portraits are in all the weekly journals—”
“Do you call that success?” she interrupted him, in coolly contemptuous tones. “Or even simple womanliness?”
He laughed quite pleasantly.
“You really are a very quaint child!” he said. “Simple womanliness! All that sort of thing went out with the second half of the reign of Victoria. I was going to say it is as extinct as the Dodo,—but that has been said before—to give it a smack of originality, let me assure you it is as extinct as Benson’s Dodo.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, still coldly. “You are too clever for me.”
He took her hand and patted it condescendingly.
“Let us leave it at that!” he said. “We’ll go and look at the roses! And the bees! ‘How doth the little busy bee’! You know the verse? And do you also know it is a much more familiar ‘poem’ to the public than the ‘Paradise Lost’? You do know that? Good! Then you are a sensible girl! And we can wait for the newspapers to fall into cackles of contradictory rumour before we believe in the war,—and for Mr. and Mrs. Montagu to come forward as a married couple before we believe in love!”
He smiled,—for a Philosopher he had quite an attractive smile,—and now and then he had a curious passing tenderness of manner that never failed to make an impression on the hearts of credulous and sympathetic women. The Sentimentalist began to think she had judged him rather hastily and hardly,—he read her thoughts in the wistful expression of her upturned blue eyes, and straightway responded by adopting for himself a quietly resigned and patient air. She grew more and more self-reproachful,—he more and more bland and condescending, and by the time they had reached the rose-walk she was in the position of a charming penitent, though she had committed no fault; and he had assumed the kindly manner of a father confessor who had just granted absolution. He pulled his black and corroded pipe from his pocket.