With that he nods slightly, and walks towards the French Embassy, leaving Marlow rooted to his chair, still staring with a blank expression of incredulity and amaze.
“And that prig, that dolt, that triple idiot might marry Cicely Seymour if he chose!” mutters the young man with the gold crook of his cane between his teeth.
Marlow cannot believe his own senses. It is eleven o’clock in the morning, and he has taken nothing but some black coffee and a devilled kidney, or he really would think he had been drinking, and forgotten the debauch.
He feels that it would be very agreeable to his feelings to return to barbarian methods and pound into a jelly the highly cultured brains of the author of the Age to Come.
“But what do you marry her for?” he shouts after Bertram’s retreating figure. He receives no answer, and Bertram passes away under the budding April boughs. To explain his reasons to Marlow would be indeed to throw pearls before swine.
As he walks backward in the direction of Hyde Park Corner he sees the figure of Annie Brown going down the almost-deserted roadway of the drive.
“Her ankles are thick,” he thinks painfully; “and why will she use such very odd words as ‘liberry’? Why? I believe philologists consider that the vernacular of the illiterate is the purest Saxon English spoken; but it grates unpleasantly on one’s ears. Is that you, Fanshawe, at last?”
Fanshawe, who has come out of his house, which is near to the French Embassy, fixes his eyeglass on the retreating figure of the unconscious Annie. He is of a supernatural quickness of observation.
Bertram, to his vexation, feels extreme embarrassment. He knows he ought to repeat to Fanshawe the confession just made to Marlow, but he cannot; it sticks in his throat like a fish bone. The eyes of the potent editor are malicious and inexorable.
“I saw you from my bedroom window sitting with that young daughter of the sovereign people,” remarks Fanshawe. “I wished for a Kodak. The Torch should have had an illustrated Easter number.”