THE BETTER SORT
"The dreadfulness I wasn't to tell you?"
"I only mean if you suppose him in a really bad hole."
The young man considered. "It can't certainly be that he has had a change of heart—never. It may be nothing worse than that the woman he wants to marry has turned against it."
"But I supposed him—with his children all so boomed—to be married."
"Naturally; else he couldn't have got such a boom from the poor lady's illness, death and burial. Don't you remember two years ago?—'We are given to unstand that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., particularly desires that no flowers be sent for the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's funeral.' And then, the next day: 'We are authorised to state that the impression, so generally prevailing, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet has expressed an objection to flowers in connection with the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's obsequies, rests on a misapprehension of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet's markedly individual views. The floral tributes already delivered in Queen's Gate Gardens, and remarkable for number and variety, have been the source of such gratification to the bereaved gentleman as his situation permits.' With a wind-up of course for the following week—the inevitable few heads of remark, on the part of the bereaved gentleman, on the general subject of Flowers at Funerals as a Fashion, vouchsafed, under pressure possibly indiscreet, to a rising young journalist always thirsting for the authentic word."
"I guess now," said Maud, after an instant, "the rising young journalist. You egged him on."
"Dear, no. I panted in his rear."
"It makes you," she added, "more than cynical."
"And what do you call 'more than' cynical?"
"It makes you sardonic. Wicked," she continued; "devilish."
334
