"Even if I were a—" she gave a glance up the table, "you should make a difference between a woman and a—bottle!"
"You are quite right," he said, after a moment. "Will you accept my apologies? I am seldom discourteous to a woman—never intentionally."
She looked at him, and saw with what an effort he spoke, his brain on fire, yet making no mistake in the precision of his words. She nodded, and turned again to Harrigan Blood, all her nature aroused to opposition at this weakness in such a man. Yet ordinarily her sympathies were quick.
"You are too hard on him," said Harrigan Blood, who had listened. "It's gone too far; he can't help it. He's got his coffin strapped to his back."
"Why doesn't some one help him?" she said irritably.
Blood shrugged his shoulders, answering with the superiority of the self-made man before the misfortune of the friend who has thrown everything away:
"Help him? There's your feminism again! The world's turned crazy on sentimentalized charity! Charity is nothing but a confession of failure! Build up! Let derelicts go! Save him? For what? In New York? We are too busy. The best that can be said is, he's drinking himself to death like a gentleman—doing it royally! His self-control's a miracle—some day there'll be an explosion! If you knew his history—"
"What is his story?"
As Blood was about to begin it, he was interrupted by a general pushing back of chairs. Busby, at the piano, flung out the chords of the sextette that had made a mediocre opera famous.
Half the party crowded, laughing and bantering, to render the chorus, the Comte de Joncy insisting on being taught the latest curious American dance. Tenafly entered to see to the clearing of the room.