I myself liked to look in and linger for either
the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now, seeing the
three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who
made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar
sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and
he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the
psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I
was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then
intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were
privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher
range of thinking.
"I shouldn't have supposed, somehow," he said, with a knot of
deprecation between his fine eyes, "that he would have had the pluck."
"Perhaps he hadn't," Minver suggested.
Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in
toleration. "You mean that she--"
"I don't see why you say that, Minver," Rulledge interposed,
chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.
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