stion of Mrs.
Folliott's manners. They didn't matter there--nobody's did; and if she
ceased to lament her ten thousand it was only because, among higher
voices, she couldn't make herself heard. Poor Blood-good didn't have
a show, as they might have said, didn't get through at any point; the
crowd was so new that--there either having been no hue and cry for
him, or having been too many others, for other absconders, in the
intervals--they had never so much as heard of him and would have no more
of Mrs. Folliott's true inwardness, on that subject at least, than she
had lately cared to have of Monteith's.

There was nothing like a crowd, this unfortunate knew, for making one
feel lonely, and he felt so increasingly during the meal; but he got
thus at least in a measure away from the terrible little lady; after
which, and before the end of the hour, he wanted still more to get away
from every one else. He was in fact about to perform this manoeuvre when
he was checked by the jolly young woman he had been having on his left
and who had more to say about the Hotels, up and down the town, than he
had ever known a young woman to have to say on any subject at all;
she expressed herself in hotel terms exclusively, the names of those
establishments playing through her speech as the _leit-motif_ might have
recurrently flashed and romped through a piece of profane modern music.
She wanted to present him to the pretty girl she had brought with her,
and who had apparently signified to her that she must do so.

"I think you know my brother-in-law, Mr. Newton Winch," the pretty girl
had immediately said; she moved her head and shoulders together, as by
a common spring, the effect of a stiff neck or of something loosened in
her back hair; but becoming, queerly enough, all the prettier for
doing so. He had seen in the papers, her brother-in-law, Mr. Monteith's
arrival--Mr. Mark P. Monteith, wasn't it?--and where he was, and she
had been with him, three days before, at the time; whereupon he had
said "Hullo, what can have brought old Mark back?" He seemed to have
believed--Newton had seemed--that that shirker, as he called him, never
_would_ come; and she guessed that if she had known she was going to
meet such a former friend ("Which he claims you are, sir," said the
pretty girl) he would have asked her to find out what the trouble could
be. But the real satisfaction would just be, she went on, if his former
friend would himself go and se