Uncle Chris had observed this for himself, and it had not helped him to face his task. Lovely woman loses something of her queenly dignity when she puffs. Inwardly, he was thinking how exactly his hostess resembled the third from the left of a troupe of performing sea-lions which he had seen some years ago on one of his rare visits to a vaudeville house.
“You ought not to tire yourself,” he said with a difficult tenderness.
“I am so fond of dancing,” pleaded Mrs Peagrim. Recovering some of her breath, she gazed at her companion with a sort of short-winded archness. “You are always so sympathetic, Major Selby.”
“Am I?” said Uncle Chris. “Am I?”
“You know you are!”
Uncle Chris swallowed quickly.
“I wonder if you have ever wondered,” he began, and stopped. He felt that he was not putting it as well as he might. “I wonder if it has ever struck you that there’s a reason.” He stopped again. He seemed to remember reading something like that in an advertisement in a magazine, and he did not want to talk like an advertisement. “I wonder if it has ever struck you, Mrs. Peagrim,” he began again, “that any sympathy on my part might be due to some deeper emotion which … Have you never suspected that you have never suspected …” Uncle Chris began to feel that he must brace himself up. Usually a man of fluent speech, he was not at his best tonight. He was just about to try again, when he caught his hostess’ eye, and the soft gleam in it sent him cowering back into the silence as if he wore taking cover from an enemy’s shrapnel.
Mrs Peagrim touched him on the arm.
“You were saying … ?” she murmured encouragingly.
Uncle Chris shut his eyes. His fingers pressed desperately into the velvet curtain beside him. He felt as he had felt when a raw lieutenant in India, during his first hill-campaign, when the etiquette of the service had compelled him to rise and walk up and down in front of his men under a desultory shower of jezail-bullets. He seemed to hear the damned things whop-whopping now … and almost wished that he could really hear them. One or two good bullets just now would be a welcome diversion.