Part 1 (1/2)
Mrs. Maxon Protests.
by Anthony Hope.
CHAPTER I
”INKPAT!”
”Inkpat!” She shot out the word in a bitter playfulness, making it serve for the climax of her complaints.
Hobart Gaynor repeated the word--if it could be called a word--after his companion in an interrogative tone.
”Yes, just hopeless inkpat, and there's an end of it!”
Mrs. Maxon leant back as far as the unaccommodating angles of the office chair allowed, looking at her friend and counsellor with a faint yet rather mischievous smile on her pretty face. In the solicitor's big, high, bare room she seemed both small and very dainty. Her voice had trembled a little, but she made a brave effort at gaiety as she explained her cryptic word.
”When a thing's running in your head day and night, week after week, and month after month, you can't use that great long word you lawyers use.
Besides, it's so horribly impartial.” She pouted over this undesirable quality.
A light broke on Gaynor, and he smiled.
”Oh, you mean incompatibility?”
”That's it, Hobart. But you must see it's far too long, besides being, as I say, horribly impartial. So I took to calling it by a pet name of my own. That makes it come over to my side. Do you see?”
”Not quite.” He smiled still. He had once been in love with Winnie Maxon, and though that state of feeling as regards her was long past, she still had the power to fascinate and amuse him, even when she was saying things which he suspected of being unreasonable. Lawyers have that suspicion very ready for women.
”Oh yes! The big word just means that we can't get on with one another, and hints that it's probably just as much my fault as his. But inkpat means all the one thousand and one unendurable things he does and says to me. Whenever he does or says one, I say invariably, 'Inkpat!' The next moment there's another--'Inkpat!' I really shouldn't have time for the long word even if I wanted to use it.”
”You were very fond of him once, weren't you?”
She shrugged her thin shoulders impatiently. ”Supposing I was?”
Evidently she did not care to be reminded of the fact, if it were a fact. She treated it rather as an accusation. ”Does one really know anything about a man before one marries him? And then it's too late.”
”Are you pleading for trial trips?”
”Oh, that's impossible, of course.”
”Is anything impossible nowadays?” He looked up at the ceiling, his brows raised in protest against the vagaries of the age.
”Anyhow, it's not what we're told. I only meant that having cared once made very little difference really--it comes to count for next to nothing, you know.”
”Not a gospel very acceptable to an engaged man, Winnie!”
She reached out her arm and touched his coat-sleeve lightly. ”I know, I'm sorry. I'm longing to know your Cicely and be great friends with her. And it's too bad to bother you with the seamy side of it just now.
But you're such a friend, and so sensible, and a lawyer too, you see.
You forgive me?”
”I'm awfully glad to help, if I can. Could you give me a few--I don't want a thousand and one, but a few--instances of 'inkpat'?”
”That wouldn't be much use. Broadly speaking, inkpat's a demand that a woman should be not what she is, but a sort of stunted and inferior reproduction of the man--what he thinks he would be, if he were a woman.