"Thank you, ma'am." And as his
eyelids closed again he murmured in luxurious peace: "Well, if that's
her--she can have ME--and welcome!"
*****
She came to see him again each day--sometimes in a linen frock and
garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and flowers before or
after her drive in the afternoon, and two or three times in the evening,
with lovely shoulders and wonderfully trailing draperies--looking like
the women he had caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his
having indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat in
the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne not through
any ardent desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to see
the show and get "a look-in" at the Four Hundred. He believed very
implicitly in his Four Hundred, and privately--though perhaps almost
unconsciously--cherished the distinction his share of them conferred
upon him, as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type
cherishes his dukes and duchesses. The English young man may revel in
his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American dwells
fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions of his
multi-millionaires' wives and daughters in the voluminous illustrated
sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched and
savourless thing.
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