"I thought I had told you. Nearly forty-six."
"Very well, then! My father is five-and-twenty years your senior."
"If you had to say exactly why you dislike your father's having married again, do you think you could?"
"Oh dear, no! I'm quite sure I couldn't. But I think it detestable for all that."
"I'm not sure that you're right. You may be, though! Are you sure it hasn't something to do with the ... with the party he's married?"
"Not at all sure." Dryly.
"Can't understand objecting to a match on its own account. It's always something to do with the outsider that comes in—the one one knows least of."
"You wouldn't like this one." It may seem inexplicable, that these words should be the cause of the person addressed taking the nearest chair to the speaker, having previously been a nomad with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat. Close analysis may connect the action with an extension of the family-friendship wardrobe, which it may have recognised—a neckcloth, perhaps—and may be able to explain why it seemed doubtful form to the Hon. Percival to keep his thumbs in those waistcoat-loops. To us, it is perfectly easy to understand—without any analysis at all—why, at this juncture, Miss Dickenson said:—"I suppose you know you may smoke a cigarette, if you like?"
In those days you might have looked in tobacconist's shopwindows all day and never seen a cigarette. It was a foreign fashion at which sound smokers looked askance. Mossoos might smoke it, but good, solid John Bull suspected it of being a kick-shaw not unconnected with Atheism. He stuck to his pipe chiefly. Nevertheless, it was always open to skill to fabricate its own cigarettes, and Mr. Pellew's aptitude in the art was known to Miss Dickenson. The one he screwed up on receipt of this licence was epoch-making. The interview had been one that was going to last a quarter of an hour. This cigarette made its duration indeterminate. Because a cigarette is not a cigar. The latter is like a chapter in a book, the former like a paragraph. At the chapter's end vacant space insists on a pause for thought, for approval or condemnation of its contents. But every paragraph is as it were kindled from the last sentence of its predecessor; as soon as each ends the next is ready. The reader aloud is on all fours with the cigarette-smoker. He doesn't always enjoy himself so much, but that is neither here nor there.
It was not during the first cigarette that Mr. Pellew said to Aunt Constance:—"Where is it they have gone to-day, do you know?" That first one heard, if it listened, all about the lady's home in Dorsetshire and her obnoxious stepmother. It may have wondered, if it was an observant cigarette, at the unreserve with which the narrator took its smoker into the bosom of her confidence, and the lively interest her story provoked. If it had—which is not likely, considering the extent of its experience—a shrewd perception of the philosophy of reciprocity, probably it wondered less. It heard to the end of the topic, and Mr. Pellew asked the question above stated, as he screwed up its successor, and exacted the death-duty of an ignition from it.