However, this evening they were less effective than usual. The world itself was tottering, and a deep, deep chord in the amazing Bill Hollis was responsive to the cataclysm. This evening he was not himself, he was more than himself; his appearance in the Private Bar was proof of it.
Miss Searson was but a woman, a human female. She meant nothing, she meant less than nothing in this hour of destiny. "Yes, that!" He filled in the pause, after waiting in vain for her to do so. "War with Germany. Do you realize it?" His voice was full of emotion.
But Miss Searson did not intend to be drawn into a discussion of anything so fanciful as war with Germany. She was practical. A censorious mouth shut like a trap. She regarded Bill with the eye of a codfish.
By an adroit turn of the head towards the farther beer-engine she gave William Hollis the full benefit of a pile of stately back hair. And then she said slowly, as if she were trying to bite off the head of each blunt syllable, "Do you realize that the Mester sometimes looks in about this time of a Thursday?"
A normal Bill Hollis would not have been slow to analyze this speech and to find a lurking insult. But he was not a normal Bill Hollis this evening; it was the last place he was likely to be in if he had been. Therefore he shook his head gently at Miss Searson without submitting her to any more destructive form of criticism. What a fool the woman was, what a common fool not to understand that in the presence of a war with Germany nothing else could possibly matter.
"I don't think I'd stop here--if I was you." Yes, there was a bluntness about Miss Searson which at ordinary times had a unique power of "getting there." But Bill merely smiled at her now. The chrysanthemum-topped fathead! Suddenly he reached the limit of his endurance; he expressed a boundless contempt for her and all her tribe by recourse to a spittoon.
How _could_ Melia ever have married him ... Melia Munt who might have married an architect!...
Bill Hollis defensively went on with his bitter. He was consumed with scorn of a person whom he had once respected immensely. She was found out, the shallow fool, fringe and back hair included! When he came to the end of the pint, he paused a moment in the midst of the pleasant sensations it had inspired and then decided that he would have another, not because he wanted another, but because he felt that it would annoy this Toplofty Crackpot.