"My dear Marianne! Well! John's a fool, I know, but I have a great respect for his judgment, sometimes. I shouldn't have begun about it myself. But he was there when Mrs. Steptoe was looking at the photographs, and he spoke of it to me.... What did he speak of? Oh—the whole thing!"
"What did he say?"
"It wasn't so much what he said. You know his way. He only said that a party he knew in the City knew a man in a Private Inquiry Office, and that sort of thing always ran into money. So his idea was—you know how funnily he phrases things?—his idea was that 'keep it snug' was the word. In fact, he repeated it several times. John's habit of repetition gets rather irritating, now and then."
"Did he say nothing else?"
"I don't think he did ... oh yes!—he exonerated your husband. At least, he said that that sort of trap wasn't the sort of trap anyone would suspect Titus of being up to. It was a little obscure, but John is obscure."
Marianne showed no disposition to take an interest in John's opinions, even assuming them to be capable of recasting in an intelligible form. She sat holding her teacup, as one anxious not to break with a pleasant memory. But her face was not pleasant for all that. It might be unfair to say it had a set jaw and a scowl, because that suggests a prizefighter without a prize. But accept as much of the description as leaves an image of a comely woman with dark hair—plenty of it—in a plait, and rather embonpoint for thirty. Put in the mole we have spoken of, just on the cheekbone; but don't run away with the idea that there must be a stye in the eye on the other side, that you are not looking at. Let Marianne have all that is left of a bonny robust girlhood that was in its day rather more acceptable—consciously so—to her brother-in-law than the more delicate approach to beauty of his deceased wife. But Marianne had gone off, too; there was no doubt of it. Nevertheless—and in spite of occasional acerbity and frequent sullenness—her husband loyally cherished the idea that she was good with a deep-buried goodness, a quality that might be relied on when the hour of trial came, a rockbed of sound-heartedness, to build on even when appearances suggested earthquake.
Some such appearance may have made Mrs. Eldridge cautious about pursuing the thread of John's judgments, as she joined in her friend's silence beyond her usual habit—a loquacious one. Presently she said, to relieve the monotony, "Shall I put your cup down?" and took it with a well-formed hand she was vain of—indeed, it ran close to beauty—from one that was rather a defect in its owner; too chubby, too accented at the rings, to be redeemed by a mere addendum of filbert-nailed fingers.
Marianne then said, as she surrendered the cup: "You saw him before he went out?" She spoke as though she took her companion's knowledge of the contents of her own silence for granted.
Mrs. Eldridge seemed to acquiesce. "He looked in for a moment," she said.
"I suppose he got his letter." This was mainly thinking aloud, for how could Charlotte know anything about his letter? She could guess, though, and was not slow over it.