A Woman-Hater Part 10

When he was gone, Severne went out on the balcony to smoke, and Harrington held a council with the young ladies. "Well, now," said he, "about this trip to the lake."

"I shall not go, for one," said Zoe, resolutely.

"La!" said f.a.n.n.y, looking carefully away from her to Harrington; "and she was the one that insisted."

Zoe ignored the speaker and set her face stiffly toward Harrington. "She only _said_ that to _him."_

_f.a.n.n.y._ "But, unfortunately, ears are not confined to the n.o.ble."

_Zoe._ "Nor tongues to the discreet."

Both these remarks were addressed pointedly to Harrington.

"Halloo!" said he, looking from one flaming girl to the other; "am I to be a shuttlec.o.c.k, and your discreet tongues the battledoors? What is up?"

"We don't speak," said the frank Zoe; "that is up."

"Why, what is the row?"'

"No matter" (stiffly).

"No great matter, I'll be bound. 'Toll, toll the bell.' Here goes one more immortal friends.h.i.+p--quenched in eternal silence."

Both ladies bridled. Neither spoke.

"And dead silence, as ladies understand it, consists in speaking _at_ one another instead of _to."_

No reply.

"That is well-bred taciturnity."

No answer.

"The dignified reserve that distinguishes an estrangement from a squabble."

No reply.

"Well, I admire permanent sentiments, good or bad; constant resolves, etc. Your friends.h.i.+p has not proved immortal; so, now let us see how long you can hold spite--SIEVES!" Then he affected to start. "What is this? I spy a rational creature out on yonder balcony. I hasten to join him.

'Birds of a feather, you know;" and with that he went out to his favorite, 'and never looked behind him.

The young ladies, indignant at the contempt the big man had presumed to cast upon the constant soul of woman, turned two red faces and four sparkling eyes to each other, with the instinctive sympathy of the jointly injured; but remembering in time, turned sharply round again, and presented napes, and so sat sullen.

By-and-by a chilling thought fell upon them both at the same moment of time. The men were good friends as usual, safe, by s.e.x, from tiffs, and could do without them; and a dull day impended over the hostile fair.

Thereupon the ingenious f.a.n.n.y resolved to make a splash of some sort and disturb stagnation. She suddenly cried out, "La! and the man is gone away: so what is the use?" This remark she was careful to level at bare s.p.a.ce.

Zoe, addressing the same person--s.p.a.ce, to wit--inquired of him if anybody in his parts knew to whom this young lady was addressing herself.

"To a girl that is too sensible not to see the folly of quarreling about a man--_when he is gone,"_ said f.a.n.n.y.

"If it is me you mean," said Zoe stiffly, _"really_ I am _surprised._ You forget we are at daggers drawn."

"No, I don't, dear; and parted forever."

Zoe smiled at that against her will.

"Zoe!" (penitentially).

"Frances!" (archly).

"Come cuddle me quick!"

Zoe was all round her neck in a moment, like a lace scarf, and there was violent kissing, with a tear or two.

Then they put an arm round each other's waist, and went all about the premises intertwined like snakes; and Zoe gave f.a.n.n.y her cameo brooch, the one with the pearls round it.

The person to whom Vizard fled from the tongue of beauty was a delightful talker: he read two or three newspapers every day, and recollected the best things. Now, it is not everybody can remember a thousand disconnected facts and recall them apropos. He was various, fluent, and, above all, superficial; and such are your best conversers. They have something good and strictly ephemeral to say on everything, and don't know enough of anything to impale their hearers. In my youth there talked in Pall Mall a gentleman known as "Conversation Sharpe." He eclipsed everybody. Even Macaulay paled. Sharpe talked all the blessed afternoon, and grave men listened, enchanted; and, of all he said, nothing stuck.

Where be now your Sharpiana? The learned may be compared to mines. These desultory charmers are more like the ornamental cottage near Staines, forty or fifty rooms, and the whole structure one story high. The mine teems with solid wealth; but you must grope and trouble to come to it: it is easier and pleasanter to run about the cottage with a lot of rooms.

all on the ground-floor.

The mind and body both get into habits--sometimes apart, sometimes in conjunction. Nowadays we seat the body to work the intellect, even in its lower form of mechanical labor: it is your clod that toddles about laboring. The Peripatetics did not endure: their method was not suited to man's microcosm. Bodily movements fritter mental attention. We _sit_ at the feet of Gamaliel, or, as some call him, Tyndal; and we sit to Bacon and Adam Smith. But, when we are standing or walking, we love to take brains easy. If this delightful chatterbox had been taken down shorthand and printed, and Vizard had been set down to Severni Opuscula, ten volumes--and, mind you, Severne had talked all ten by this time--the Barfords.h.i.+re squire and old Oxonian would have cried out for "more matter with less art," and perhaps have even fled for relief to some shorter treatise--Bacon's "Essays," Browne's "Religio Medici," or Buckle's "Civilization." But lounging in a balcony, and lazily breathing a cloud, he could have listened all day to his desultory, delightful friend, overflowing with little questions, little answers, little queries, little epigrams, little maxims _'a la Rochefoucauld,_ little histories, little anecdotes, little gossip, and little snapshots at every feather flying.

"Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, Gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago Severni."

But, alas! after an hour of touch-and-go, of superficiality and soft delight, the desultory charmer fell on a subject he had studied. So then he bored his companion for the first time in all the tour.

But, to tell the honest truth, Mr. Severne had hitherto been pleasing his friend with a cold-blooded purpose. His preliminary gossip, that made the time fly so agreeably, was intended to oil the way to lubricate the pa.s.sage of a premeditated pill. As soon as he had got Vizard into perfect good humor, he said, apropos of nothing that had pa.s.sed, "By-the-by, old fellow, that five hundred pounds you promised to lend me!"

Vizard was startled by this sudden turn of a conversation, hitherto agreeable.

"Why, you have had three hundred and lost it," said he. "Now, take my advice, and don't lose any more."

"I don't mean to. But I am determined to win back the three hundred, and a great deal more, before I leave this. I have discovered a system, an infallible one."

"I am sorry to hear it," said Harrington, gravely. "That is the second step on the road to ruin; the gambler with a system is the confirmed maniac."

"What! because _other_ systems have been tried, and proved to be false?

Mine is untried, and it is mere prejudice to condemn it unheard."

"Propound it, then," said Vizard. "Only please observe the bank has got its system; you forget that: and the bank's system is to take a positive advantage, which must win in the long run; therefore, all counter-systems must lose in the long run."

"But the bank is tied to a long run, the individual player is not."

This reply checked Vizard for a moment and the other followed up his advantage. "Now, Vizard, be reasonable. What would the trifling advantage the bank derives from an incident, which occurs only once in twenty-eight deals, avail against a player who could foresee at any given deal whether the card that was going to come up the nearest thirty would be on the red or black?"

"No avail at all. G.o.d Almighty could break the bank every afternoon.

_Apre's?_ as we say in France. Do you pretend to omniscience?"