Here she walked beside him, the Madame Oldmeadow of the hotel, looking before her as she walked and thinking, he would have wagered, not of him but of Serbia.
She wore a beautifully adjusted little costume, conveying in its sober darkness the impression of richness and simplicity that her clothes had always given him. Fur was turned up about her ears and a small hat of fur and velvet was turned down over her eyes as she had always worn her hats. The straight fringe of gold showed under its brim and under the gold were those calm, those questing, melancholy eyes.
Or perhaps—he carried further his rueful reverie—she was thinking about the date of the Hospice. He had the guide-book in his pocket.
“Isn’t it jolly?” he suggested, as she looked up at him, indicating the prospect spread before them and adding, since he knew that his English instinct for boyish understatement still puzzled her: “Like a great, grim queen in shabby clothes; raised on such a throne and crowned with such jewels that one feels her glorious rather than ugly.”
Adrienne studied the shabby queen attentively and then looked back at him. Perhaps something dwelling in his eyes, something for her only and not at all for Lyons, caught her more special attention, for she said suddenly, and so unexpectedly that, with a sort of terror, he felt that his crisis might be coming: “You’ve been very dear to me, Mr. Oldmeadow, in all our time here. I feel it to have been a great privilege, you know; a great opportunity.”
“Really? In what way?” He could at all events keep his voice quiet and light. “I thought it had been you who made all the opportunities.”
“Oh, no. I never make any of the opportunities I am thinking of,” said Adrienne. “I only know how to take them. It isn’t only that you are more widely and deeply cultured than I am—though your Italian accent isn’t good!”—she smiled; “but I always feel that you see far more in everything than I do, even when you seem to be seeing less. I have to go carefully and pick up fact by fact, while you see things in a sort of vision and they are all related as they enter your mind. That’s where my privilege comes in. You make me share your vision sometimes. You have the artistic mind, and I am not really artistic at all—though Mother always wanted that for me more than anything; with all that goes with it.”
She was speaking of herself—though it was only in order to express more exactly her gratitude, and, as he walked beside her, he was filled with the mingled hope and terror. After all he had still four more days of her. It would be terrible to spoil them.
“No; you aren’t artistic,” he agreed. “And I don’t know that I am, either. Whether I am or not, I feel mine to have been the opportunity and the privilege.”
“I can’t understand that at all,” she said, with her patent candour.