The situation before Miss Cutter's return developed in other directions still, and when that event took place, at a few minutes past seven, these circumstances were, by the foot of the stair, between mistress and maid, the subject of some interrogative gasps and scared admissions.Lady Wantridge had arrived shortly after the interloper, and wishing, as she said, to wait, had gone straight up in spite of being told he was lying down.
"She distinctly understood he was there?""Oh yes ma'am; I thought it right to mention.""And what did you call him?"
"Well, ma'am, I thought it unfair to YOU to call him anything but a gentleman."Mamie took it all in, though there might well be more of it than one could quickly embrace."But if she has had time," she flashed, "to find out he isn't one?""Oh ma'am, she had a quarter of an hour.""Then she isn't with him still?"
"No ma'am; she came down again at last.She rang, and I saw her here, and she said she wouldn't wait longer."Miss Cutter darkly mused."Yet had already waited--?""Quite a quarter."
"Mercy on us!" She began to mount.Before reaching the top however she had reflected that quite a quarter was long if Lady Wantridge had only been shocked.On the other hand it was short if she had only been pleased.But how COULD she have been pleased?
The very essence of their actual crisis was just that there was no pleasing her.Mamie had but to open the drawing-room door indeed to perceive that this was not true at least of Scott Homer, who was horribly cheerful.
Miss Cutter expressed to her brother without reserve her sense of the constitutional, the brutal selfishness that had determined his mistimed return.It had taken place, in violation of their agreement, exactly at the moment when it was most cruel to her that he should be there, and if she must now completely wash her hands of him he had only himself to thank.She had come in flushed with resentment and for a moment had been voluble, but it would have been striking that, though the way he received her might have seemed but to aggravate, it presently justified him by causing their relation really to take a stride.He had the art of confounding those who would quarrel with him by reducing them to the humiliation of a stirred curiosity.
"What COULD she have made of you?" Mamie demanded.
"My dear girl, she's not a woman who's eager to make too much of anything--anything, I mean, that will prevent her from doing as she likes, what she takes into her head.Of course," he continued to explain, "if it's something she doesn't want to do, she'll make as much as Moses."Mamie wondered if that was the way he talked to her visitor, but felt obliged to own to his acuteness.It was an exact description of Lady Wantridge, and she was conscious of tucking it away for future use in a corner of her miscellaneous little mind.She withheld however all present acknowledgment, only addressing him another question."Did you really get on with her?""Have you still to learn, darling--I can't help again putting it to you--that I get on with everybody? That's just what I don't seem able to drive into you.Only see how I get on with YOU."She almost stood corrected."What I mean is of course whether--""Whether she made love to me? Shyly, yet--or because--shamefully?
She would certainly have liked awfully to stay.""Then why didn't she?"
"Because, on account of some other matter--and I could see it was true--she hadn't time.Twenty minutes--she was here less--were all she came to give you.So don't be afraid I've frightened her away.
She'll come back."
Mamie thought it over."Yet you didn't go with her to the door?""She wouldn't let me, and I know when to do what I'm told--quite as much as what I'm not told.She wanted to find out about me.Imean from your little creature; a pearl of fidelity, by the way.""But what on earth did she come up for?" Mamie again found herself appealing, and just by that fact showing her need of help.
"Because she always goes up." Then as, in the presence of this rapid generalisation, to say nothing of that of such a relative altogether, Miss Cutter could only show as comparatively blank: "Imean she knows when to go up and when to come down.She has instincts; she didn't know whom you might have up here.It's a kind of compliment to you anyway.Why Mamie," Scott pursued, "you don't know the curiosity we any of us inspire.You wouldn't believe what I've seen.The bigger bugs they are the more they're on the lookout."Mamie still followed, but at a distance."The lookout for what?""Why for anything that will help them to live.You've been here all this time without making out then, about them, what I've had to pick out as I can? They're dead, don't you see? And WE'RE alive.""You? Oh!"--Mamie almost laughed about it.
