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Kinraid now seemed in a hurry; but Philip was stung with curiosity to ascertain his movements, and suddenly addressed him: 'I heard yo' were i' these parts. Are you for staying here long? There was a certain abruptness in Philip's tone, if not in his words, which made Kinraid look in his face with surprise, and answer with equal curtness.
'Whose? The curtness of the counter-question, and the cool, slow manner in which, as he put it, Mr. Grewgious moved his eyes from the fire to his companion's face, might at any other time have been exasperating. In his depression and exhaustion, Jasper merely opened his eyes to say: 'The suspected young man's. 'Do you suspect him? asked Mr. Grewgious. 'I don't know what to think.
From any one else it would have been a matter of indifference to her, and hardly to be noticed; it vexed both ear and heart when Roger used the expression; and there was a curtness of manner as well as of words in her reply. 'Oh! she was over-tired by the ball. Papa has seen her, and says she will be all right very soon. 'I wonder if she wants change of air? said Roger, meditatively.
But this was certainly anything but normal. He lay awake all night, brooding, and on the following morning he breakfasted alone. When he came home for lunch, Helena received him with an expression of pained resignation. "Why do you treat me like that?" she asked. He apologised, with as few words as possible. Then he repented his curtness and climbed down. Thus matters stood for six months.
Then Meigs rose cat-like and laid his hand on the door-knob. "Do I understand that you refuse to move in a matter which should be the first duty of a good citizen, Mr. Kent?" he asked purringly. "I certainly do refuse to fall into any such clumsy trap as you have been trying to bait for me, Mr. Meigs," said David Kent, dropping back into his former curtness.
"Most of the way," said Mary, and tingled with a rather feline pleasure to see that her curtness merely sharpened the interest of Jack. The boy puffed on his cigarette, not with long, slow breaths of inhalation like a practised smoker, but with a puckered face as though he feared that the fumes might drift into his eyes. "Why," thought Mary, "he's only a child!"
The curtness of telegrams often creates ambiguities, and when Sherman saw in print Halleck's dispatch of the 26th separated from the rest of the series, he naturally gave to it the meaning which hurt him so. Had he known the rest of the story, he would have seen no treachery to old friendships. The sin was in the unprecedented publications which embroiled everything.
Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated naïveté as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly in reserve.
It seemed to him that it was the hardest thing he had ever done but he accomplished it as best he could. He was peremptorily refused. His sensations when he read the letter are not easy to describe. There was more than mere business curtness in the denial. There was actual unfriendliness.
"We shall never miss it," he added, with the hopefulness of those who can blind themselves to facts. "Come, tell me your impressions of France." "I have been there before," replied Loo, with a curtness so unusual as to make Miriam glance at him. "I have been there before, you know. It would be more interesting to hear your own impressions, which must be fresher."
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