She went forward to greet Lady Chassilis, and Amaldi came up to Sophy. She saw her husband glance their way, then deliberately turn his back and begin talking to the man next him. Something in that great, stolid, well-shaped back struck Sophy as ominous. She felt herself grow even paler. Her very lips felt cold as they rested on each other. She was filled with a presentiment of coming disaster. But, somehow, as she looked into Amaldi's eyes and listened to his quiet voice, a feeling of reassurance stole over her. This feeling was wholly without reason. It was only that his mere presence seemed to give her a feeling of safety, as on that first occasion of their meeting.
"Did Bobby approve of my offering?" he asked, noticing her extreme pallor. He thought that she looked even more lovely pale like this.
"Yes. It was good of you. He went to sleep with the little boat in his arms."
Here Oswald Tyne approached. He was one of the most remarkable characters of his day. Years ago, when she was a schoolgirl, Sophy had heard him lecture in her own country. He himself had then been a youth but just graduated from Oxford. She remembered him, a slender, poetic figure. Now he was a heavy, middle-aged man. The long face had become jowled; the light irises of his eyes showed too broad a crescent of white below them. The sensual, heavy-lipped, good-natured mouth seemed to weigh upon the chin, creasing it downward. He was always delightful to Sophy, but she always felt ill-at-ease with him. This feeling was obscure to her herself. She had never tried to analyse it. With the oddest contradiction, at one and the same time she admired his gifts, and felt a great compassion for him—the man. And this compassion could not have been called forth by anything in the circumstances of his life.
"Thank you for being so pale to-night, dear lady," he said in his abrupt, whimsical way. "One gets so weary of colour. How Iris must have hated her rainbow at times. Our Englishwomen are too beautifully tinted. One longs sometimes for the sight of an albino. Think of an assembly of negroes and albinos. How austere and weird at the same time. Would you have such an assembly garmented all in black or white or dull orange?"
"But orange is a colour," ventured Sophy, smiling.
Tyne grew extremely serious and impressive. "No; no! Pardon me. Orange is only the earthly body of light. I think we should dress our assembly in orange—the albinos in a clear tulip tint—the negroes in a fierce saffron."
"Oswald! what fwightful nonsense you talk at times!" cried Mrs. Arundel, overhearing this. "Please go and take in Countess Hohenfels. She's dying to hear you talk."
Tyne looked at her out of his heavy, swimming eyes.
"A German? You have given me a German for dinner? I see. You divined that my mood would be musical. But Germans have mathematical imaginations. Their music is the integral calculus of the spheres. It is——"