They had not walked fifty yards up the quay when two British workmen, in holiday costume, who had just turned the corner of the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, approached them. Seeing him to be an Englishman, one of the two addressed Neigh, saying, ‘Can you tell us the way, sir, to the Hotel Bold Soldier?’
Neigh pointed out the place he had just come from to the tall young men, and continued his walk with Ladywell.
Ladywell was the first to break silence. ‘I have been considerably misled, Neigh,’ he said; ‘and I imagine from what has just happened that you have been misled too.’
‘Just a little,’ said Neigh, bringing abstracted lines of meditation into his face. ‘But it was my own fault: for I ought to have known that these stage and platform women have what they are pleased to call Bohemianism so thoroughly engrained with their natures that they are no more constant to usage in their sentiments than they are in their way of living. Good Lord, to think she has caught old Mountclere! She is sure to have him if she does not dally with him so long that he gets cool again.’
‘A beautiful creature like her to think of marrying such an infatuated idiot as he!’
‘He can give her a title as well as younger men. It will not be the first time that such matches have been made.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Ladywell vehemently. ‘She has too much poetry in her—too much good sense; her nature is the essence of all that’s romantic. I can’t help saying it, though she has treated me cruelly.’
‘She has good looks, certainly. I’ll own to that. As for her romance and good-feeling, that I leave to you. I think she has treated you no more cruelly, as you call it, than she has me, come to that.’
‘She told me she would give me an answer in a month,’ said Ladywell emotionally.
‘So she told me,’ said Neigh.