The other
gentlemen, at Mrs. Burrage's, were all too well occupied; there was not
the smallest chance of one of them coming to his rescue. He couldn't
leave Mrs. Luna, and yet he couldn't stay with her and lose the only
thing he had come so much out of his way for. "Let me at least find you
a place over there, in the doorway. You can stand upon a chair--you can
lean on me."
"Thank you very much; I would much rather lean on this sofa. And I am
much too tired to stand on chairs. Besides, I wouldn't for the world
that either Verena or Olive should see me craning over the heads of the
crowd--as if I attached the smallest importance to their perorations!"
"It isn't time for the peroration yet," Ransom said, with savage
dryness; and he sat forward, with his elbow on his knees, his eyes on
the ground, a flush in his sallow cheek.
"It's never time to say such things as those," Mrs. Luna remarked,
arranging her laces.
"How do you know what she is saying?"
"I can tell by the way her voice goes up and down. It sounds so silly."
Ransom sat there five minutes longer--minutes which, he felt, the
recording angel ought to write down to his credit--and asked himself how
Mrs. Luna could be such a goose as not to see that she was making him
hate her. But she was goose enough for anything. He tried to appear
indifferent, and it occurred to him to doubt whether the Mississippi
system could be right, after all. It certainly hadn't foreseen such a
case as this.
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