Dora Forbes evidently felt the dilemma; he gave an irritated crook
to his moustache. "SHALL I go in?" he presently asked.
We looked at each other hard a moment; then I expressed something
bitter that was in me, expressed it in an infernal "Do!" After
this I got out into the air, but not so fast as not to hear, when
the door of the drawing-room opened, the disconcerted drop of Miss
Collop's public manner: she must have been in the midst of the
larger latitude. Producing with extreme rapidity, Guy Walsingham
has just published a work in which amiable people who are not
initiated have been pained to see the genius of a sister-novelist
held up to unmistakeable ridicule; so fresh an exhibition does it
seem to them of the dreadful way men have always treated women.
Dora Forbes, it's true, at the present hour, is immensely pushed by
Mrs. Wimbush and has sat for his portrait to the young artists she
protects, sat for it not only in oils but in monumental alabaster.
What happened at Prestidge later in the day is of course
contemporary history. If the interruption I had whimsically
sanctioned was almost a scandal, what is to be said of that general
scatter of the company which, under the Doctor's rule, began to
take place in the evening? His rule was soothing to behold, small
comfort as I was to have at the end.
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