“Perhaps I did think her inhuman. At all events I thought her invulnerable.”
“Yes. I remember. With all her absurdity you thought she had great power.” Mrs. Aldesey looked at him thoughtfully. “And it was when you found she hadn’t that you could be sorry for her.”
“Not at all,” said Oldmeadow again. “I still think she has great power. People can have power and go to pieces.”
“Did she go to pieces? That day in Oxford? I can’t imagine her in pieces, you know.”
He had a feeling of drawing back; or of drawing Adrienne back. “In the sense of being so unhappy, so obviously unhappy, over Palgrave,” he said.
He saw that Lydia would have liked to go on questioning, as, of course, it would have been perfectly natural for her to do. Was not Adrienne Toner and her absurdity one of their pet themes? Yet she desisted. She desisted and it was because she felt some change in him; some shrinking and some pain. “Well, let’s hope that she is happy, now, or as happy as she can be, poor thing, doing great deeds in America,” she said. And she turned the talk back to civilization and its danger.
They talked a good deal about civilization during their last three days together. He wanted things, during these three days of mingled recovery and farewell, to be as happy as possible between him and his friend, for he knew that Lydia’s heart was heavy, for him and not for civilization. The front to which he was going was more real to her, because it was much nearer, and his peril was more real than during his absence in distant climes. He felt himself that the French front, at this special time, would probably make an end of him and, for the first time since their early friendship, he knew conjecture as to his relation with Lydia; wondered, if it had not been for Mr. Aldesey in New York, whether Lydia might have been in love with him, and realized, with a curious sense of anxiety and responsibility, that her friendship for him now was the closest tie in her life. The war might to her, too, mean irreparable loss. And he was sorry that it was so; sorry to think that the easy, happy intercourse had this hidden depth of latent suffering.
Lydia’s feeling, and its implications, became the clearer to him when, on their last evening together, she said to him suddenly: “Perhaps you’ll see her over there.”
He could not pretend not to know whom she meant, nor could he pretend to himself not to see that if it troubled Lydia that he should be sorry for Adrienne that could only be because she cared far more for him than he had ever guessed.
He said, as easily as he could manage it, for the pressure of his realizations made him feel a little queer: “Not if she’s in America.”