We all of us have our prejudices. Maud had a prejudice against fat
men. It may have been the spectacle of her brother Percy, bulging
more and more every year she had known him, that had caused this
kink in her character. At any rate, it existed, and she gazed in
sickened silence at Geoffrey. He had turned again now, and she was
enabled to get a full and complete view of him. He was not merely
stout. He was gross. The slim figure which had haunted her for a
year had spread into a sea of waistcoat. The keen lines of his face
had disappeared altogether. His cheeks were pink jellies.
One of the distressed gentlewomen had approached with a
slow disdain, and was standing by the table, brooding on the
corpse upstairs. It seemed a shame to bother her.
"Tea or chocolate?" she inquired proudly.
"Tea, please," said Maud, finding her voice.
"One tea," sighed the mourner.
"Chocolate for me," said Geoffrey briskly, with the air of one
discoursing on a congenial topic. "I'd like plenty of whipped
cream. And please see that it's hot."
"One chocolate."
Geoffrey pondered. This was no light matter that occupied him.
"And bring some fancy cakes--I like the ones with icing on
them--and some tea-cake and buttered toast. Please see there's
plenty of butter on it."
Maud shivered. This man before her was a man in whose lexicon there
should have been no such word as butter, a man who should have
called for the police had some enemy endeavoured to thrust butter
upon him.
"Well," said Geoffrey leaning forward, as the haughty ministrant
drifted away, "you haven't changed a bit. To look at, I mean."
"No?" said Maud.
"You're just the same. I think I"--he squinted down at his
waistcoat--"have put on a little weight. I don't know if you notice
it?"
Maud shivered again. He thought he had put on a little weight, and
didn't know if she had noticed it! She was oppressed by the eternal
melancholy miracle of the fat man who does not realize that he has
become fat.
"It was living on the yacht that put me a little out of condition,"
said Geoffrey. "I was on the yacht nearly all the time since I saw
you last. The old boy had a Japanese cook and lived pretty high. It
was apoplexy that got him. We had a great time touring about. We
were on the Mediterranean all last winter, mostly at Nice."
"I should like to go to Nice," said Maud, for something to say. She
was feeling that it was not only externally that Geoffrey had
changed. Or had he in reality always been like this, commonplace
and prosaic, and was it merely in her imagination that he had been
wonderful?