“Quite,” said Elinor, who with a whimsical little smile had been looking at a waiter with sprouting moustaches, as he bent with prayerful reverence, stirring the ingredients in a salad bowl—“Oh, Francis, darling, look—” she whispered, nodding toward the man. “Don’t you love it?… Don’t you simply adore the way they do it?… I mean, you know! Now where? Where?” she cried, with a gesture of complete surrender—“where could you find anything like that in America?… I mean, you simply couldn’t find it—that’s all.”
“Quite!” said Francis concisely. And turning to Eugene, he would say with that impressive air of absolute sad earnestness, “And it’s really most important. It really is, you know. It’s astonishing to see what they can put into a single gesture. I mean—the Whole Thing’s there. It really is.”
“Francis!” Elinor would say, looking at him with her gay and tender little smile, and biting her lip as she did so—“You kid, you! I mean!—”
Suddenly she put her hand strongly before her eyes, bent her head, and was rigid in a moment of powerful and secret emotion. In a moment, however, she would look up, wet-eyed, suddenly thrust her arm across the table at Eugene, and putting her hand on his arm with a slight gallant movement, say quietly:
“O, I’m sorry—you poor child!… After all, there’s no reason why you should have to go through all this…. I mean, darling,” she explained gently, “I have an adorable kid at home just four years old—sometimes something happens to make me think of him—you understand, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good,” she said briskly and decisively, with a swift and gallant smile, as she patted his arm again. “I knew you would!”
She had left her husband and child in Boston, she had come here to join Francis, fatality was in the air, but she was always brave and gallant about it. As Francis would say to Eugene as they sat drinking alone in a café:
“It’s mad—Boston!… Perfectly mad—Boston!… I mean, the kind of thing they do when they ride a horse up the steps of the State House…. I mean, perfectly grand, you know,” he cried with high enthusiasm. “They stop at nothing. It’s simply swell—it really is, you know.”
Everyone was being very brave and gallant and stopping at nothing, and
