“Perhaps it’s because I’m rather incurious,” said Shearwater. “One ought to be curious, I think. I’ve come to feel lately that I’ve not been curious enough about people.” The particulars began to peep, alive and individual, out of the vagueness, like rabbits; Gumbril saw them in his fancy, at the fringe of a wood.
“Quite,” he said encouragingly. “Quite.”
“I think too much of my work,” Shearwater went on, frowning. “Too much physiology. There’s also psychology. People’s minds as well as their bodies.... One shouldn’t be limited. Not too much, at any rate. People’s minds....” He was silent for a moment. “I can imagine,” he went on at last, as in the tone of one who puts a very hypothetical case, “I can imagine one’s getting so much absorbed in somebody else’s psychology that one could really think of nothing else.” The rabbits seemed ready to come out into the open.
“That’s a process,” said Gumbril, with middle-aged jocularity, speaking out of his private warm morass, “that’s commonly called falling in love.”
There was another silence. Shearwater broke it to begin talking about Mrs. Viveash. He had lunched with her three or four days running. He wanted Gumbril to tell him what she was really like. “She seems to me a very extraordinary woman,” he said.
“Like everybody else,” said Gumbril irritatingly. It amused him to see the rabbits scampering about at last.
“I’ve never known a woman like that before.”
Gumbril laughed. “You’d say that of any woman you happened to be interested in,” he said. “You’ve never known any women at all.” He knew much more about Rosie, already, than Shearwater did, or probably ever would.
Shearwater meditated. He thought of Mrs. Viveash, her cool, pale, critical eyes; her laughter, faint and mocking; her words that pierced into the mind, goading it into thinking unprecedented thoughts.
“She interests me,” he repeated. “I want you to tell me what she’s really like.” He emphasized the word really, as though there must, in the nature of things, be a vast difference between the apparent and the real Mrs. Viveash.