CHAPTER II.
Some women and many men are compounded and shaped into sentient beings without the infusion of so much as a pennyweight of tact.
Many women and a few men combine with this deficiency—which is, in itself, a deformity—a fatal facility for saying exactly the wrong thing when the wrong thing will do most harm.
Miss Marvel had taken all the honors in this line which native bias and feminine fussiness could win, and she wove a new spray into her laurel wreath one day in the March succeeding the winter in which Barton Ashe and Agnes Welles were made one—in law and gospel.
The morrow would be his wife’s birthday, and Barton had in his breast pocket a tiny box containing a sapphire ring for her, when he arose to resign his seat in the street car to the dashing spinster, whom he recognized as soon as she entered. He had never seen her since his wedding eve, but she was not a woman to be forgotten or overlooked. She was in great force to-day, gorgeously appareled and flushed beyond high-rouge mark by three hours at a literary breakfast, given at Delmonico’s to a distinguished foreigner.
“I am surcharged with electric thought,” she confided to Mr. Ashe when she had taken the vacated place with a cavalier nod that might mean “Thanks,” or “That’s only decent, my good man.”
“Ah!” said Barton, in naïve wonderment, for the want of anything else to say.
“Surcharged! bristling! I could fancy that at the approach of the negative pole I should crackle and emit sparkles like a brisk battery. Such a feast of intellect! such flow of soul! such scintillating wit! Three hours of such intercourse were worth ten—a thousand cycles of Cathay. Our guest was superb! such dignity and such graciousness of affability as can only coexist in an Old World product.”
She spoke loudly, after the manner of the New World product (genus homo, feminine gender). Several solid men peered at her around or over the evening papers. Two giddy girls, who had taken without thanks or scruples seats from weary men, smiled undisguisedly. Barton, standing in the aisle, holding on by the strap, his knees abraded by the jet passementerie of Miss Marvel’s velvet skirt, could not budge an inch. He must hear and, hearing, essay reply of some sort. “Ah!” albeit the safest and most commodious monosyllable in the language, cannot go on forever.
“The lunch was largely attended, I suppose?” he ventured in tones studiously lowered.