Roland was not one of those who analyse their emotions. When he was attracted by some new interest he did not put himself in the confessional, and he did not now ask himself why or how Beatrice had appealed to him.
As a matter of fact, she did not attract him physically. Her beauty added to the glamour that enriched her loneliness, but did not touch him otherwise. It was interest he felt for her, a compelling interest for someone outside the circle of his own experience, who was content to disparage what he admired and had filled her own life with other enthusiasms. She was remote, inscrutable. She lived and ate and talked and moved among them, but she had no part there. And because he was so interested in her he was desperately anxious that she should feel some interest in him. She was a mystery for him, but he was not content she should remain a mystery; he wanted to understand her, to become friends, so that in her troubles she should turn to him for sympathy and guidance. How wonderful that would be, that this aloof and beautiful woman should share with him an intimacy that she denied her husband. He would watch her as he had watched her the previous evening moving among her friends, indifferent and apart from them, and they would sit, as they had sat, hardly noticing her, talking of their own affairs, perhaps casting towards her a glance of casual speculation: "What is she really?" they would say, and then put her from their mind and return to their bridge and their billiards and their cricket shop. But he would know, and as she turned from the window he would appreciate the significance of that little movement, that hesitation almost of the shoulders, and she would turn her eyes to him, those sad, disdainful, dove-coloured eyes of hers, that invited nothing and offered nothing, but would become for him flooded with sympathy and gentle friendship; there would be no need for words—just that meeting of the eyes across a crowded drawing-room.
Immersed in reverie, he walked up and down the long grass path that ran from the cricket field to the rose garden, and when his name was shouted suddenly, shrilly and from very close, he approximated to that condition of dismay that the vernacular describes as "jumping out of one's skin." He turned, to see Muriel standing two yards behind him, her hands upon her hips, shaking with laughter.
"I have been watching you for ten minutes," she said as soon as she had recovered her breath, "and it's the funniest sight I've seen; you've been walking up and down the path with your head in the air, and your hands clenched together behind your back, and your lips were moving. I'm certain you were talking to yourself. I couldn't think what you were doing. I sat behind that bush there and watched you going up and down and up and down, your hands clenched and your head flung back and your lips moving, and then at last I guessed——"
"Well, what was it?"
"You were composing poetry. Now, don't laugh, I'm serious, and I want to know who you were composing it for."
"Well, who do you think it was?"
"That girl, of course."
"What girl?"