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Updated: June 6, 2025
Even her mother, from whose gentle lips she rarely expected to hear wisdom, had said: "I don't see how you're going to 'live, dear, without a man to take care of you." Her mother was right, Nature was right, Rattenden was right. She, Zora Middlemist, had been hopelessly wrong. When Sypher arrived she welcomed him with an unaccustomed heart-beat.
A horrible, jealous hatred of the big man for whom she sought sprang up in his heart. His pink face flushed red. "This sole bonne femme is excellent," said Rattenden. Sypher started in confusion, and praised the chef, and talked gastronomy while his thoughts were with Zora. He remembered the confession of Septimus Dix in Paris. Septimus had been caught in the irresistible atmosphere.
Of course, if the philosopher has guessed her unformulated desire, then things are easy for him, and he can discourse with certitude on feminine vagaries, as Rattenden did on the journeyings of Zora Middlemist. He has the word of the enigma. But to the woman herself her state of mind is an exasperating puzzle, and to her friends, philosophic or otherwise, her consequent actions are disconcerting.
Everywhere he goes he finds them to his hand, as Septimus's friend found the Toby jugs. Wherever Rattenden turned, a bit of gossip met his ear. Very few things, therefore, happened in literary and theatrical London which did not come inevitably to his knowledge. He could have wrecked many homes and pricked many reputations.
Said the Literary Man from London, who had strolled with them on one of these occasions: "The good lady's one of those women who speak as if they had a relation who had married a high official in the Kingdom of Heaven and now and then gave them confidential information." Sypher liked Rattenden because he could often put into a phrase his own unformulated ideas.
The end of the Mordaunt Prince story is that he soon grew too much for the widow, who has pensioned him off, and now he is drinking himself to death in Naples." "Emmy Oldrieve! Good God, is it possible?" cried Sypher, absently pushing aside the dish the waiter handed him. Rattenden carefully helped himself to partridge and orange salad. "It's not only possible, but unquestionable fact.
He also belonged to a world to which he himself was a stranger, the world of books and plays and personalities and theories of art. Sypher thought that its denizens lived on a lofty plane. "The atmosphere," said Rattenden, "is so rarified that the kettle refuses to boil properly. That is why we always have cold tea at literary gatherings. My dear fellow, it's a damned world.
"Any wise man," said Rattenden, "can realize his dreams. It takes something much higher than wisdom to enjoy the realization." "What is that?" "The heart of a child," said Rattenden. He smiled in his inscrutable way behind his thick lenses, and sipped his champagne. "Truly a delicious wine," said he.
He became subdued, and spoke only of travel and men and things, of anything but the Cure. He preferred to listen and, as Rattenden preferred to talk, he found conversation a simple matter. Rattenden was an amusing anecdotist and had amassed a prodigious amount of raw material for his craft. To the collector, by some unknown law of attraction, come the objects which he collects.
Oldrieve drew her woolen shawl around her lean shoulders. "I'm afraid you quite snubbed Mr. Rattenden, just when he was saying one of his cleverest things." "He said it to the wrong person, mother. I'm neither a faded life nor am I going to be laid away in lavender. Do I look like it?"
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