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He still had no compunction when he heard her bewilderedly sigh: “Oh you’re too delightfully droll!”

“No, I only put thing’s just as they are, and as I’ve also learned a little, thank heaven, to see them–which isn’t, I quite agree with you, at all what any one does. You’re in the deep doze of the spell that has held you for long years, and it would be a shame, a crime, to wake you up. Indeed I already feel with a thousand scruples that I’m giving you the fatal shake. I say it even though it makes me sound a little as if I thought myself the fairy prince.”

She gazed at him with her queerest kindest look, which he was getting used to in spite of a faint fear, at the back of his head, of the strange things that sometimes occurred when lonely ladies, however mature, began to look at interesting young men from over the seas as if the young men desired to flirt. “It’s so wonderful,” she said, “that you should be so very odd and yet so very good-natured.” Well, it all came to the same thing–it was so wonderful that SHE should be so simple and yet so little of a bore. He accepted with gratitude the theory of his languor–which moreover was real enough and partly perhaps why he was so sensitive; he let himself go as a convalescent, let her insist on the weakness always left by fever. It helped him to gain time, to preserve the spell even while he talked of breaking it; saw him through slow strolls and soft sessions, long gossips, fitful hopeless questions–there was so much more to tell than, by any contortion, she COULD–and explanations addressed gallantly and patiently to her understanding, but not, by good fortune, really reaching it. They were perfectly at cross-purposes, and it was the better, and they wandered together in the silver haze with all communication blurred.

When they sat in the sun in her formal garden he quite knew how little even the tenderest consideration failed to disguise his treating her as the most exquisite of curiosities. The term of comparison most present to him was that of some obsolete musical instrument. The old-time order of her mind and her air had the stillness of a painted spinnet that was duly dusted, gently rubbed, but never tuned nor played on. Her opinions were like dried rose- leaves; her attitudes like British sculpture; her voice what he imagined of the possible tone of the old gilded silver-stringed harp in one of the corners of the drawing-room. The lonely little decencies and modest dignities of her life, the fine grain of its conservatism, the innocence of its ignorance, all its monotony of stupidity and salubrity, its cold dulness and dim brightness, were there before him. Meanwhile within him strange things took place. It was literally true that his impression began again, after a lull, to make him nervous and anxious, and for reasons peculiarly confused, almost grotesquely mingled, or at least comically sharp. He was distinctly an agitation and a new taste–that he could see; and he saw quite as much therefore the excitement she already drew from the vision of Addie, an image intensified by the sense of closer kinship and presented to her, clearly, with various erratic enhancements, by her friend the doctor’s daughter. At the end of a few days he said to her: “Do you know she wants to come without waiting any longer? She wants to come while I’m here. I received this morning her letter proposing it, but I’ve been thinking it over and have waited to speak to you. The thing is, you see, that if she writes to YOU proposing it–“

“Oh I shall be so particularly glad!”

CHAPTER V

They were as usual in the garden, and it hadn’t yet been so present to him that if he were only a happy cad there would be a good way to protect her. As she wouldn’t hear of his being yet beyond precautions she had gone into the house for a particular shawl that was just the thing for his knees, and, blinking in the watery sunshine, had come back with it across the fine little lawn. He was neither fatuous nor asinine, but he had almost to put it to himself as a small task to resist the sense of his absurd advantage with her. It filled him with horror and awkwardness, made him think of he didn’t know what, recalled something of Maupassant’s– the smitten “Miss Harriet” and her tragic fate. There was a preposterous possibility–yes, he held the strings quite in his hands–of keeping the treasure for himself. That was the art of life–what the real artist would consistently do. He would close the door on his impression, treat it as a private museum. He would see that he could lounge and linger there, live with wonderful things there, lie up there to rest and refit. For himself he was sure that after a little he should be able to paint there–do things in a key he had never thought of before. When she brought him the rug he took it from her and made her sit down on the bench and resume her knitting; then, passing behind her with a laugh, he placed it
over her own shoulders; after which he moved to and fro before her, his hands in his pockets and his cigarette in his teeth. He was ashamed of the cigarette–a villainous false note; but she allowed, liked, begged him to smoke, and what he said to her on it, in one of the pleasantries she benevolently missed, was that he did so for fear of doing worse. That only showed how the end was really in sight. “I dare say it will strike you as quite awful, what I’m going to say to you, but I can’t help it. I speak out of the depths of my respect for you. It will seem to you horrid disloyalty to poor Addie. Yes–there we are; there I am at least in my naked monstrosity.” He stopped and looked at her till she might have been almost frightened. “Don’t let her come. Tell her not to. I’ve tried to prevent it, but she suspects.”