But apparently the manners and customs of the shady debauchees to whom Miss Bonnybell’s upbringing had acclimatized her, and from whom she generalized, formed no criterion for the conduct of the gentleman in whose company she now found herself. He did not change his attitude or his occupation by an inch, his foot still gently rolling the beatified Jock slowly to and fro, after the method that experience had taught him to be most acceptable. Neither did he speak.
Edward Ransome had never much flow of small talk, going mooning through that life whose circumstances forbade his ever giving open expression to his real feelings or true thoughts, in a sort of dreamy twilight of silence and self-suppression. He ought to say something to the dazzling anomaly that had seated itself by his dull hearthstone, but for the life of him he could not think what.
It was the anomaly who, surprised and relieved at his entire apparent innocence of the kind of enterprise with which she had credited or discredited him, saved him the trouble of initiating a subject.
“Am I sitting in your chair?” A movement just sketched with hasty grace towards leaving the seat she occupied accompanied the question.
“Oh dear, no!” in courteous distress at the suggestion. “I have not got a chair.”
“You do not say so?”
The words were nothing, but the tone carried such a delicate implication of interest in anything relating to his habits, coupled with a still more delicate fear of carrying that interest into intrusiveness, that Edward felt vaguely gratified.
“I mean that I have not any special chair which makes me inclined to growl as Jock does when another dog approaches the sacred confines of his basket.”
“Thank you for relieving my mind!” she answered gratefully. “I thought I might have taken it without knowing—one makes such stupid mistakes out of ignorance!”
There was a meek but not exaggerated thankfulness for his reassuring information in her whole air; and as if encouraged by his indulgence to gain further enlightenment, she went on—