He was a patient and unmoral man.

He could wait longer for Valerie,--and for the first secret blow at the happiness and threatened artistic success of Louis Neville.
So he rolled away in his taxi very comfortably, savouring his cigarette, indolently assured of his reception in a house which it would suit him perfectly to inhabit when he cared to.
Only one thing worried him a little--the short note he had received from his friend Penrhyn Cardemon, saying rather brusquely that he'd made up his mind not to have his portrait painted for five thousand dollars, and that he was going off on _The Mohave_ to be gone a year at least.
Which pained Querida, because Cardemon had not only side-stepped what was almost a commission, but he had, also, apparently forgotten his invitation to spend the summer on _The Mohave_--with the understanding that Valerie West was also to be invited.
However, everything comes in its season; and this did not appear to be the season for ripe commissions and yachting enterprises; but it certainly seemed to be the season for a judicious matrimonial enterprise.
And when Mrs.Hind-Willet received him in a rose-tinted reception corner, audaciously intimate and secluded, he truly felt that he was really missing something of the pleasures of the chase, and that it was a little too easy to be acutely enjoyable.
However, when at last he had gently retained her hand and had whispered, "Alma," and had let his big, dark, velvet eyes rest with respectful passion upon her smaller and clearer and blacker ones, something somewhere in the machinery seemed to go wrong--annoyingly wrong.
Because Mrs.Hind-Willet began to laugh--and evidently was trying not to--trying to remain very serious; but her little black eyes were glistening with tears of suppressed mirth, and when, amazed and offended, he would have withdrawn his hand, she retained it almost convulsively: "Jose! I _beg_ your pardon!--I truly do.

It is perfectly horrid and unspeakable of me to behave this way; but listen, child! I am forty; I am perfectly contented not to marry again; _and_ I don't love you.

So, my poor Jose, what on earth am I to do if I don't laugh a little.

I _can't_ weep over it you know." The scarlet flush faded from his olive skin.