Between the two rooms he said, “Yes, mean to. It’s a big thing. I’m certain of it. We shall keep it open for you. We shan’t fill it.” He put his hand on the drawing-room door and opened it. “We can’t.”
She went in radiant.
She was on the red bus again, going home. She had stayed but the briefest time after dinner. She was too elevated, too buoyant, too possessed possibly to remain in company; excitedly desirous to be alone with her excited thoughts,—especially to be alone with them in that significant apartment of hers. Significant! Why upon the very day of entering it had come this most triumphant sign of its significance! Significant!...
She had a front seat on the outside of the omnibus. She gazed before her along a path of night that the lamps jewelled in chains of gold, and streamed along it her tumultuous thoughts, terrible as an army with banners. It was very strange, and it vexed her, robbing her of her proud consciousness of them, that there obtruded among them, as one plucking at her skirt—as captain of them she rode before them—the figure of Laetitia’s Harry. Similarly he had obtruded and been like to spoil the pleasure of her visit; but he had been made to provide compensations and he obtruded now only in rebirth of a passage with him that, rehearsed again, much pleased her even while, annoyed, she cut him down.
Taking her leave, she had been seen from the threshold by Mr. Sturgiss and by Laetitia’s Harry. It was pitchy dark, emerging from the brightness of the interior, and he had stepped with her to conduct her to the gate. “It was an extraordinary coincidence, meeting you here,” he had said.
She did not reply. His voice was most strangely grave for an observation so trite; he might have been speaking some deeply meditated thing, profound, heavy with meaning, charged with fate. Fatuous! It was extraordinary that there was not an action of his but aroused her animosity. This vibrant gravity of tone—an organ used for a jig, just as his gifts were used for his Laetitia moon-calfings—caused newly a disturbance within her against him. She would have liked to whistle or in some equal way to express indifference to his presence.
They were at the gate and he stooped to the latch and appeared to have some trouble with it. “Sturgiss has been telling me what a wonderful person you are.”
Again that immense gravity of tone. She was astonished at the sudden surge of her animosity that it caused within her. She had desired to express indifference. She desired now to assail. She made a sneer of her voice. “I should have thought you had ears for the wonder of no one but Laetitia.”
“Why do you say that?”
She felt her lip curl with her malevolence. “To see you raise your eyes and hear you breathe ‘Ah, Laetitia!’”