And she wondered whether he had scored or she had. She would like to
feel that he was hard hit enough to go through this affair hell for
leather, into the Divorce Court and out into marriage. It came to her at
that moment, for the first time, that she liked him,—more than liked
him; that he appealed to her and did odd new things to her heart. She
felt that she could make her exit from the gang with this man.
As for Arrowsmith, he was sufficiently hard hit to hate Feo for the
record that she had made, sufficiently in love with her to resent her
kite-tail of indiscriminations. He loved but didn’t like her, and this
meant that he would unmagnetize himself as soon as he could and bolt.
The bunkers that she had found in his nature were those of
fastidiousness, not often belonging to men. But for being the son of
Arrowsmith, the iron founder, whose wealth had been quadrupled by the
War, he would have been a poet, although he might never have written
poetry. As it was, he considered that women should be chaste, and was
the object of derision for so early-Victorian an opinion. The usual
hobby thus failing, he raced, liking thoroughbreds who played the game.
A queer fish, Arrowsmith.
Georgie Malwood came up. She was with her fourth mother-in-law, Mrs.
Claude Malwood, whose back view was seventeen, but whose face was older
than the Pyramids. And Arrowsmith drifted off to the paddock.
But they lunched and spent the day together and one of the horses,
“Mince Pie,” won the fourth race at six to one, beating the favorite by
a short head. And so Feo had a good day. They got away ahead of the
crowd, except for the people of the theater, who had to dine early and
steady down before entering upon the arduous duties of the night,
especially those of the chorus who, in these days of Reviews, are called
upon to make so many changes of clothes. Art demands many sacrifices.—It
had been decided that the Ritz would do for dinner and one of the
dancing clubs afterwards. But on the way out Gilbert Macquarie pranced
up to Feo, utterly inextinguishable, with a hatband of one club and a
tie of another and clothes that would have frightened a steam roller.
“Oh, hello, old thing,” he cried, giving one of his choicest wriggles.
“How goes it?”
To which Feo replied, with her most courteous insolence, “Out, Mr.
Macquarie,” touched Arrowsmith’s arm and went.
But the nasty familiarity of that most poisonous bounder did something
queer to Arrowsmith’s physical sense, and he couldn’t for the life of
him play conversational ball with Feo on the road home. “To follow
_that_,” he thought, and was nauseated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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