er
sailed, I think, that one of these vivid comforts of travel did not reach
her at the dock. Poppas recognized me just as the striped object left his
hand. He was standing with his arm still extended over the rail, his
fingers contemptuously sprung back. "Lest we forget!" he said with a
shrug. "Does Madame Cressida know we are to have the pleasure of your
company for this voyage?" He spoke deliberate, grammatical English--he
despised the American rendering of the language--but there was an
indescribably foreign quality in his voice,--a something muted; and
though he aspirated his "th's" with such conscientious thoroughness,
there was always the thud of a "d" in them. Poppas stood before me in a
short, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of his
greyish skin and hair and waxed moustache; a monocle on a very wide black
ribbon dangled over his chest. As to his age, I could not offer a
conjecture. In the twelve years I had known his thin lupine face behind
Cressida's shoulder, it had not changed. I was used to his cold,
supercilious manner, to his alarming, deep-set eyes,--very close
together, in colour a yellowish green, and always gleaming with something
like defeated fury, as if he were actually on the point of having it out
with you, or with the world, at last.

I asked him if Cressida had engagements in London.

"Quite so; the Manchester Festival, some concerts at Queen's Hall, and
the Opera at Covent Garden; a rather special production of the operas
of Mozart. That she can still do quite well,--which is not at all, of
course, what we might have expected, and only goes to show that our
Madame Cressida is now, as always, a charming exception to rules."
Poppas' tone about his client was consistently patronizing, and he was
always trying to draw one into a conspiracy of two, based on a mutual
understanding of her shortcomings.

I approached him on the one subject I could think of which was more
personal than his usefulness to Cressida, and asked him whether he still
suffered from facial neuralgia as much as he had done in former years,
and whether he was therefore dreading London, where the climate used to
be so bad for him.

"And is still," he caught me up, "And is still! For me to go to London is
martyrdom, _chere Madame_. In New York it is bad enough, but in London it
is the _auto da fe_, nothing less. My nervous system is exotic in any
country washed by the Atlantic ocean, and it shivers like a