had taken from him what he wanted most in life, and had not seemed to take it, or to want it, or to care.
Starwick and Elinor had quarrelled again: this time it was because he too had decided to go back to Paris that afternoon. No one but Elinor knew the purpose of his going; and that purpose, whatever it was, did not please her. When Eugene entered the dining-room for his last meal with them, they were at it hammer and tongs, totally oblivious of the sensation they were causing among the whispering and conspiring old men and women all about them. Or, if not oblivious, they were indifferent to it: even in their quarrels they kept their grand and rare and special manner—a manner which more and more conceived the universe as an appropriate backdrop for the subtle and romantic complications of their own lives, and which, in its remote and lofty detachment from the common run of man, said that here was an intercourse of souls that was far too deep and rare for the dull conscience of the world to apprehend.
Elinor was talking earnestly, positively, an accent rich, yet sharp, cultivated, yet formidably assured, a well-mannered authority, positive with denial and the conviction of experience.
“You cannot do it! I tell you that you cannot do it! You will come a cropper if you do!”
Starwick’s face was flushed deeply with anger; he answered quietly in a mannered tone filled with a sense of outrage and indignation.
“I resent that very much,” he said. “It is very wrong and very unfair of you to speak that way! I resent it!” he said quietly but with stern reproof.
“Sorry!” she clipped the word out curt and brusque, the way the English say it. “If you resent it, you resent it—and that’s that! But after all, my dear, what else do you expect? If you insist on bringing any little cut-throat you pick up in a Montmartre bistro along with you everywhere you go, your friends are going to complain about it! And they’ve a right to!”
“I resent that very much!” he said again, in his mannered tone.
“Sorry!” she said crisply, curtly, as before. “But that’s the way I feel about it!” She looked at him for a moment, and then, suddenly shaking her head in a short and powerful movement, she said in a whispering shudder of revulsion and disgust:
“No good, Frank!… I’m willing to make all the allowances I can…
