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"He did leave you at an anxious point, didn't he?" Halson smiled to the rest of us at Rulledge's expense, and then said: "Well, I think I can help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?" "By sight, Minver does," Rulledge answered for us. "Wants to paint her." "Of course," Halson said, with intelligence. "But I doubt if he'd find her as paintable as she looks, at first.
"Don't reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name." "Go on, Wanhope," Rulledge puffed impatiently. "Though I don't see how there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women." "In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response.
When brought to book for his inconsistency by Rulledge, he said he was merely welcoming the new blood, if not young blood, that Newton was infusing into our body, which had grown anaemic on Wanhope's psychology and Rulledge's romance; or, anyway, it was a change.
"Do you suppose she always knows it first?" Rulledge asked. "You may be sure," Minver answered for Wanhope, "that if she didn't know it, he never would." Then Wanhope answered for himself: "I think that generally she sees it coming.
Rulledge was by when I read it, and he decided, with that unsparing activity of his, where other people are concerned, that I must go; I certainly could not resist such an appeal as that. He had a vague impression, he said, of something weird in the situation down there, and I ought to go and pull Alderling out of it; besides, I might find my account in it as a psychologist.
"Then you know what a type she was, I suppose," he turned to the others, "and as they're both dead it's no contravention of the club etiquette against talking of women, to speak of her. I can't very well give the instance the sign that Rulledge is seeking without speaking of her, unless I use a great deal of circumlocution." We all urged him to go on, and he went on.
Rulledge was eating a caviar sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying.
Everybody I've met here to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I'd heard of it, and if I knew how it could have happened." "And do you?" Rulledge asked. "I can give a pretty good guess," Halson said, running his merry eyes over our faces. "Anybody can give a good guess," Rulledge said. "Wanhope is doing it now." "Don't let me interrupt." Halson turned to him politely. "Not at all.
I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to interrupt and dispute.
For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman," Wanhope returned. "Or a bold one," Minver suggested. "No; the response must be in kind to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn't be afraid." "Oh! That's the way you get out of it!" "Well?" Rulledge urged.
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