"Gosh!" said he, shutting the book, "and I suppose Doria understands it too, or she wouldn't have recommended it. But," he rose ponderously and looked down on me with serious eyes—"what the Hell is it all about?"
I drew out my watch. "The five seconds that you have before rushing up-stairs to dress," said I, "don't give me adequate time to expound a philosophic system."
Now if Adrian or I had talked to Jaffery about soul-progression and the Will to Power and suggested that he was missing the essentials of life, we should have been met with bellows of rude and profane derision. I don't believe he had even roughly considered what kind of an individuality he had, still less enquired into the state of his spiritual being. But the flip of a girl he professed so much to despise came along and reduced him to a condition of helpless introspection. I cannot say that it lasted very long. Psychology and metaphysics and æsthetics lay outside Jaffery's sphere. But while seeing no harm in his own simple creed of straight-riding and truth-speaking, he added to it an unshakable faith in Doria's intellectual and spiritual superiority. On his first meeting with her he had disclaimed the subtler mental qualities, videlicet his similitude of the bumble-bee; now, however, he went further, declaring himself, to a subrident host, to be a chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with savages. He would listen, with childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of tongue, exchanging with Doria the shibboleths of the Higher Life. He had been considerably impressed by Adrian as the author of a successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader of the stars with Doria, appeared to him in the light of an immortal.
Adrian and I, when alone, laughed over old Jaff, as we had laughed over him for goodness knows how many years. I, who had guessed (with Barbara's aid) the incidence of the thunderbolt, found in his humility something pathetic which was lost to Adrian. The latter only saw the blustering, woman-scorning hulk of thews and sinews, at the mercy of anything in petticoats, from Susan upward. I disagreed. He was not at the mercy of Liosha.
"You burrowing mole," cried Adrian one morning in the library, Jaffery having gone off to golf, "can't you see that he goes about in mortal terror of her?"
"No such thing!" I retorted hotly. "He has regarded her as an abominable nuisance—a millstone round his neck—a responsibility—"
"A huntress of men," he interrupted. "Especially an all too probable huntress of Jaffery Chayne. With Susan and Barbara and Doria he knows he's safe—spared the worst—so he yields and they pick him up—look at him and stand him on his head and do whatever they darn well like to him; but with Liosha he knows he isn't safe. You see," Adrian continued, after having lit a cigarette, "Jaffery's an honourable old chap, in his way. With Liosha, his friend Prescott's widow, it would be a question of marriage or nothing."
"You're talking rubbish," said I. "Jaffery would just as soon think of marrying the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour."
"That's what I'm telling you," said Adrian. "He's in a mortal funk lest his animated Statue of Liberty should descend from her pedestal and with resistless hands take him away and marry him."
"For one who has been hailed as the acutest psychologist of the day," said I, "you seem to have very limited powers of observation."