'I do believe you, Tom. I'll be more careful.' Her eyes were very soft, her manner quiet, her gentle tone untinged with any emotion. Yet Tom detected, he felt sure, a certain eagerness behind the show of apparent indifference. She liked to talk—to go on talking—about Tony. 'Do you really think so, really mean it?' he heard her asking, and thus knew his thought confirmed. She invited more. And, with open eyes, with a curious welcome even to the pain involved, Tom deliberately stepped into the cruel little trap. But he almost felt that something pushed him in. He talked exactly like a boy: 'He—he's got a peculiar power with women,' he said. 'I can't make it out quite. He's not good-looking—exactly—is he?' It was impossible to conceal his eagerness to know exactly what she did feel.
'There's a touch of genius in him,' she answered. 'I don't think looks matter so much—I mean, with women.' She spoke with a certain restraint, not deliberately saying less than she thought, but yet keeping back the entire truth. He suddenly realised a relationship between her and Tony into which he was not admitted. The distance between them increased visibly before his very eyes.
And again, out of a hundred things he wanted to say, he said—as though compelled to—another thing.
'Rather!' he burst out honestly. 'I should hate it if—you hadn't liked him.' But a week ago he would have phrased this differently—'If he had not liked you.'
There were perceptible pauses between their sentences now, pauses that for him seemed breaking with a suspense that was painful, almost cruel. He knew worse was coming. He both longed for it yet dreaded it. He felt at her mercy, in her power somehow.
'It's odd,' she went on slowly, 'but in England I thought him stupid rather, whereas out here he's changed into another person.'
'I think we've all changed—somehow,' Tom filled the pause, and was going to say more when she interrupted.
She kept the conversation upon Tony. 'I shall never forget the day he walked in here first. It was the week I arrived. You'll laugh, Tom, when I tell you——' She hesitated—almost it seemed on purpose.
'How was it? How did he look?' The forced indifference of the tone betrayed his anxiety.
'Well, he's not impressive exactly—is he?—as a rule. That little stoop—and so on. But I saw his figure coming up the path before I recognised who it was, and I thought suddenly of an Egyptian, almost an old Pharaoh, walking.'