THE BETTER SORT
"Whichever one looks at."
"But May Grantham's glorious. She has turned herself out———"
"With a splendour of taste and a sense of effect, eh? "Yes." Sutton showed he saw far.
"She has the sense of effect. The sense of effect as exhibited in Lady Gwyther's clothes———!" was something Miss Banker failed of words to express. "Every body's overwhelmed. Here, you know, that sort of thing's grave. The poor creature's lost."
"Lost?"
"Since on the first impression, as we said, so much depends. The first impression's made—oh, made! I defy her now ever to unmake it. Her husband, who's proud, won't like her the better for it. And I don't see," Miss Banker went on, "that her prettiness was enough—a mere little feverish, frightened freshness; what did he see in her?—to be so blasted. It has been done with an atrocity of art———"
"That supposes the dressmaker then also a devil?"
"Oh, your London women and their dressmakers!" Miss Banker laughed.
"But the face—the face!" Sutton woefully repeated.
"May's?"
"The little girl's. It's exquisite."
"Exquisite?"
"For unimaginable pathos."
"Oh!" Miss Banker dropped.
"She has at last begun to see." Sutton showed again how far he saw. "It glimmers upon her innocence, she makes it dimly out what has been done with her. She's even worse this evening—the way, my eye, she looked at dinner!—than when she came. Yes"—he was confident—"it has dawned (how couldn't it, out of all of you?) and she knows."
"She ought to have known before!" Miss Banker intelligently sighed.
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