Re: The Aristocrat/The Carnie
The Count's people never meant what they said. There was room for manoeuver and misinterpretation thusly and everyone could then be satisfied with the impression they took away from a conversation. In this case, the Count meant precisely what it was he had said. Wherever the boy stayed, it was not the dining car. Unless he slept under a table with a napkin for a blanket, hup! The Count's eyes glittered behind his glasses, amused. He was impervious to seduction but he found the boy's interjection worth amusement. No one who was on the outside enjoyed order. It meant remaining outside, rather than in.
"There is a lady who has gone," he said, with the vague dismissal of matters that did not matter to the Count. The train had stopped but the vintage still poured. He would have found the assertion that the lower classes passed gossip amongst themselves like fleas amusing also. Rumor was rife among the bored and no one was more bored than the aristocracy.
"She has vanished. Into plain air. They stop, they look," the aristocrat used the slide of his hand in short, clean strokes to separate the two activities, "They will find. Or they will not find. And she will be dead." He spoke without emotion. The Count had known many dead.