"I assure you, you were very elegant altogether out there in the wood. I was utterly ashamed of you. Why my father is ten times the human being you are: you gentleman!"
He reached and rang the bell for Mrs. Bolton. But he was yellow at the gills.
She went up to her room, furious, saying to herself: "Him and buying people! Well, he doesn't buy me, and therefore there's no need for me to stay with him. Dead fish of a gentleman, with his celluloid soul! And how they take one in, with their manners and their mock wistfulness and gentleness. They've got about as much feeling as celluloid has."
She made her plans for the night, and determined to get Clifford off her mind. She didn't want to hate him. She didn't want to be mixed up very intimately with him in any sort of feeling. She wanted him not to know anything at all about herself: and especially, not to know anything about her feeling for the keeper. This squabble of her attitude to the servants was an old one. He found her too familiar, she found him stupidly insentient, tough and india rubbery where other people were concerned.
She went downstairs calmly, with her old demure bearing, at dinnertime. He was still yellow at the gills: in for one of his liver bouts, when he was really very queer. He was reading a French book.
"Have you ever read Proust?" he asked her.
"I've tried, but he bores me."
"He's really very extraordinary."
"Possibly! But he bores me: all that sophistication! He doesn't have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I'm tired of self-important mentalities."
"Would you prefer self-important animalities?"
"Perhaps! But one might possibly get something that wasn't self-important."
"Well, I like Proust's subtlety and his well-bred anarchy."
"It makes you very dead, really."
"There speaks my evangelical little wife."
They were at it again, at it again! But she couldn't help fighting him. He seemed to sit there like a skeleton, sending out a skeleton's cold grizzly will against her. Almost she could feel the skele-
