These anxious symptoms developed--one cannot but feel rather unjustly--as
the consequence of his own politeness, his amenity of manner, and the
patient attentions he paid on the previous evening to one of his wife's
guests. He had sat altogether too long for personal comfort in a draughty
corner of the hotel garden, with Mrs. Callowgas. Affected by the poetic
influences of moon, stars, and sea, affected also conceivably by pagan
amorous influences, naughtily emanating from the neighbouring Venus
Temple--whose elegant tapering columns adorn the facade of the local
Mairie--Mrs. Callowgas became extensively reminiscent of her dear dead
Lord Bishop. Protracted anecdotes of visitations and confirmation tours,
excerpts from his sermons, speeches and charges, arch revelations of his
diurnal and nocturnal conversation and habits--the latter tedious to the
point of tears when not slightly immodest--poured from her widowed lips.
The good lady overflowed. She frankly babbled. General Frayling listened,
outwardly interested and civil, inwardly deploring that he had omitted
to put on a waistcoat back-lined with flannel--waxing momentarily more
conscious, also, that the iron--of the hard cold slats composing the seat
of his garden chair--if not entering into his soul, was actively entering
a less august and more material portion of his being through the slack of
his thin evening trousers.
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