The Moon and Sixpence Read Free Page A

she had the same kindly expression and sedate, untroubled eyes.
    'They're both of them the image of you', I said.
    'Yes; I think they are more like me than their father.'
    'Why have you never let me meet him?' I asked.
    'Would you like to?'
    She smiled, her smile was really very sweet, and she blushed a little; it was singular that a woman of that age should flush so readily. Perhaps her naivete was her greatest charm.
    'You know, he's not at all literary', she said. 'He's a perfect philistine.'
    She said this not disparagingly, but affectionately rather, as though, by acknowledging the worst about him, she wished to protect him from the aspersions of her friends.
    'He's on the Stock Exchange, and he's a typical broker. I think he'd bore you to death.'
    'Does he bore you?' I asked.
    'You see, I happen to be his wife. I'm very fond of him.' She smiled to cover her shyness, and I fancied she had a fear that I would make the sort of gibe that such a confession could hardly have failed to elicit from Rose Water-ford. She hesitated a little. Her eyes grew tender.
    'He doesn't pretend to be a genius. He doesn't even make much money on the Stock Exchange. But he's awfully good and kind.'
    'I think I should like him very much.'
    'I'll ask you to dine with us quietly some time, but mind, you come at your own risk; don't blame me if you have a very dull evening.'

6
    But when at last I met Charles Strickland, it was under circumstances which allowed me to do no more than just make his acquaintance. One morning Mrs Strickland sent me round a note to say that she was giving a dinner-party that evening, and one of her guests had failed her. She asked me to stop the gap. She wrote:
    It's only decent to warn you that you will be bored to extinction. It was a thoroughly dull party from the beginning, but if you will come I shall be uncommonly grateful. And you and I can have a little chat by ourselves.
    It was only neighbourly to accept.
    When Mrs Strickland introduced me to her husband, he gave me a rather indifferent hand to shake. Turning to him gaily, she attempted a small jest.
    'I asked him to show him that I really had a husband. I think he was beginning to doubt it.'
    Strickland gave the polite little laugh with which people acknowledge a facetiousness in which they see nothing funny, but did not speak. New arrivals claimed my host's attention, and I was left to myself. When at last we were all assembled, waiting for dinner to be announced, I reflected, while I chatted with the woman I had been asked to 'take in', that civilized man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on tedious exercises the brief span of his life. It was the kind of party which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled to bid her guests, and why the guests have troubled to come. There were ten people. They met with indifference, and would part with relief. It was, of course, a purely social function. The Stricklands 'owed' dinners to a number of persons, whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them; these persons had accepted. Why? To avoid the tedium of dining tête-à-tête, to give their servants a rest, because there was no reason to refuse, because they were 'owed' a dinner.
    The dining-room was inconveniently crowded. There was a KC and his wife, a Government official and his wife, Mrs. Strickland's sister and her husband, Colonel MacAndrew, and the wife of a Member of Parliament. It was because the Member of Parliament found that he could not leave the House that I had been invited. The respectability of the party was portentous. The women were too nice to be well dressed, and too sure of their position to be amusing. The men were solid. There was about all of them an air of well-satisfied prosperity.
    Everyone talked a little louder than natural in an instinctive desire to make the party go, and there was a great deal of noise in the room. But there was no general conversation. Each one talked to his neighbour; to his neighbour on the right