Strange drank his beer with a look at the half-made creature who had plumbed ‘loife’ from the vantage ground of her sewers.
“Very like his betters,” he thought, “we get lots of our views from a vantage ground not one whit sweeter or cleaner than Tolly’s.”
He made a fresh dive into the pâté and his thoughts broke out on a new track.
“I think we’re going off somehow. I believe it is a good deal the women’s fault; this new craze for advanced talk between the sexes is no good, the women who affect it are never clever enough nor good enough to make a success of the thing, it’s a pose mostly, as their smoking is, just done for effect.—Tolly, pass that jam!”
When he had rounded off his meal with a hunch of bread and strawberry jam, he stretched himself, went to the window and looked out, drumming gently on the pane.
“I wonder,” he thought, “I wonder if I am quite a fool or not, but—but, God! how I love her!”
Then he stopped drumming, and began to wonder vaguely how in the name of Heaven he was able to eat great hunches of bread and jam not five minutes before.
He turned and watched Tolly through the door, devouring at his ease, with a sudden shock of disgust, more at himself than at the fellow, with his hideous mouth all moist and jammy. He turned again to the window and tried to steady his brain, but it reeled and everything in the room swam before him, he dropped his head in his hands and trembled from head to foot, when he raised it he felt steadier and not so raging hot.
“I shall chance it,” he said, “I shall chance it.”
When he reached Lady Mary’s he was in a much more wholesome frame of mind. He had gone there by roundabout ways, where he saw a good deal of stark, staring, naked humanity; this helped to crystallize his emotions, to sift the dross out and leave the clean stuff.