her tones of full rich fellowship and banter in which, however, a trace of something ugly, envious, and mocking was evident—“all dressed up in his Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes out for a walk this fine morning just to give the pretty girls a treat! Yes, sir!” she cried again, shaking her head in wondering admiration, and with an air of beaming satisfaction, “I’ll bet you that’s just what he’s going to do.”
He flushed, unable to think of an apt reply to this good-natured banter, beneath whose hearty good-fellowship he felt the presence of something that was false, ugly, jeering and curiously tormented, and while he was blundering out a clumsy greeting, Horton, laughing with lazy good-nature at his confusion, slapped him on the back and said:
“How are yuh, kid?… Where the hell have you been keeping yourself, anyway?”
The tone was almost deliberately coarse and robust in its hearty masculinity, but beneath it one felt the same false and spurious quality that had been evident in the woman’s tone.
—“And here is Mister Starwick!” Effie now cried brightly. “—And I wish you’d look!” she went on, as if enraptured by the spectacle—“all dressed up with a walking-stick and a dog—and yes, sir!” she exclaimed ecstatically, after an astonished examination of Frank’s sartorial splendour—“wearing a bee-yew-teeful brown tweed suit that looks as if it just came out of the shop of a London tailor!… My! my! my!… I tell you!” she went on admiringly—“I just wish the folks back home could see us now, Pooly—”
Horton laughed coarsely, with apparent good nature, but with an ugly jeering note in his voice.
“—I just wish they could see us now!” she said. “It’s not everyone can say they knew two London swells—and here they are—Mr. Starwick with his cane and his dog—and Eugene with his new suit—yes, sir!—and talking to us just as if we were their equals.”
Eugene flushed, and then with a stiff and inept sarcasm, said:
“I’ll try not to let it make any difference between us, Effie.”
Horton laughed coarsely and heartily again, with false good nature, and then smote the boy amiably on the back, saying:
“Don’t let her kid you, son! Tell her to go to hell if she gets fresh with you!”
“—And how is Mr. Starwick these fine days!” cried Effie gaily, now directing the artillery of her banter at his unworthy person—“Where is that great play we’ve all been waiting for so eagerly for, lo! these many years!
