“I am not sufficiently egotistical to imagine that my individual refusal to countenance it would have any effect upon society,” answered Falconer, still more stiffly. “To tolerate is by no means to approve.”
Falconer’s reasons for the toleration in question—the real reasons, of which he himself was wholly unconscious—would have astonished him not a little, if he could have brought himself to realise them, in their narrow conventionality. Fortunately it did not occur to Mrs. Romayne to ask for them. With the ready tact of a woman of the world she turned the conversation with a gracefully worded question as to his recent expedition. He answered it with the courteous generality—only rather more gravely spoken—with which he had answered a great many similar questions put to him during the past week by ladies to whom he had been introduced in his capacity of momentary celebrity; and she passed on from one point to another with the superficial interest evoked by one of the topics of the hour. Her exaggerated comments and questions, more or less wide of the mark, were exhausted at length, and a moment’s pause followed; a fact that indicated, though Falconer did not know it, that the preceding conversation had involved some kind of strain on the bright little woman who had kept it up so vivaciously. The pause was broken by Falconer.
“You have heard,” he said, “of poor Thomson’s illness?”
It would hardly be true to say that Mrs. Romayne started—even slightly—but a curious kind of flush seemed to pass across her face. As she answered, both her voice and her manner seemed instinctively to increase and emphasize that distance which she had tacitly set between them; it was as though the introduction into the conversation of a name their mutual familiarity with which represented mutual interests and connections had created the instinct in her.
“Yes, poor man!” she said carelessly. “There has been a good deal of illness about this season, somehow.”
“I am afraid it is a bad business,” went on Falconer, with no comprehension of the turn she had given to the conversation, and with his mental condemnation of what seemed to him simple heartlessness on her part not wholly absent from his voice. “There was to be a consultation to-day; and I shall call this evening to hear the result. But I am afraid there is very slender hope.”
“How very sad!” said Mrs. Romayne with polite interest.
Falconer bent his head in grave assent, and then with a view to arousing in her shallow nature—as it seemed to him—some remembrance at least of the usefulness to her of the man whose probable death she contemplated so carelessly, he said with formal courtesy:
“Thomson has done all the work connected with our joint trusteeship so admirably hitherto that there has been no need for my services. But if, while he is ill, you should find yourself in want of his aid in that capacity, I need not say that I am entirely at your command.”
Again that curious flush passed across Mrs. Romayne’s face, leaving it rather pale this time.