“It’s like the Arietta, don’t you think?” said Emily suddenly, “the Arietta of Op. 111.” And she hummed the first bars of the air. “Don’t you feel it’s like that?”
“What’s like that?”
“Everything,” said Emily. “To-day, I mean. You and me. These gardens——” And she went on humming.
Gumbril shook his head. “Too simple for me,” he said.
Emily laughed. “Ah, but then think how impossible it gets a little farther on.” She agitated her fingers wildly, as though she were trying to play the impossible passages. “It begins easily for the sake of poor imbeciles like me; but it goes on, it goes on, more and more fully and subtly and abstrusely and embracingly. But it’s still the same movement.”
The shadows stretched farther and farther across the lawns, and as the sun declined the level light picked out among the grasses innumerable stipplings of shadow; and in the paths, that had seemed under the more perpendicular rays as level as a table, a thousand little shadowy depressions and sun-touched mountains were now apparent. Gumbril looked at his watch.
“Good Lord!” he said, “we must fly.” He jumped up. “Quick, quick!”
“But why?”
“We shall be late.” He wouldn’t tell her for what. “Wait and see” was all that Emily could get out of him by her questioning. They hurried out of the gardens, and in spite of her protests he insisted on taking a taxi into town. “I have such a lot of unearned increment to get rid of,” he explained. The Patent Small-Clothes seemed at the moment remoter than the farthest stars.