“Well, I certainly don’t feel inclined to endure that broiling walk for the sake of les beaux yeux of Madame Trotter et filles. It’s a dull neighbourhood, this, but the Trotters are, perhaps, when all’s done and told, the dullest people in it.”
“You’ve always seemed to get on particularly well with them, I’ve thought,” said Mrs. Dallas, in the voice that when it seemed considerate could contrive to be most disparaging. “It’s a pity not to go. You need a walk. You can’t afford Carlsbad this year, you know.”
“I need hardly be reminded of that,” said Colonel Dallas, and now it was fretfully. “To run the risk of apoplexy on the road and to drink the Trotters' foul Indian tea is hardly an equivalent. No; I shall practise some putting shots, and perhaps, if it gets cooler towards evening, I’ll go over to the links. The Trotters can manage without me.—What time do the Varleys arrive?”
“At seven-thirty. There’s no other train they could arrive by, as far as I’m aware.”
The colonel looked at his watch, drew his hat down over his eyes, and went slowly away round the corner of the house.
His wife’s eyes did not follow him, nor, it was evident, her thoughts.
“It has been rather oppressive, hasn’t it?” said Rupert, glancing up at her. “You haven’t been feeling it too much, I hope.”
“Not at all. I like it. I think it’s only people who don’t know how to be quiet who mind the heat,” said Mrs. Dallas. “This is the one time of the year that one can sit out of doors in a thin dress, and I am very grateful for it.” Even about small things Mrs. Dallas always seemed to have her mind quite made up. Her likes and dislikes, for all the inertness of her demeanour, were clear and unshifting. She sometimes made Rupert feel himself amorphous, vague, uncertain; and this feeling, though blissful, had yet its sting of sadness and anxiety.
“Well, some people aren’t able to be quiet, are they?” he observed. “On a day like this I always think of people in factories,—great, roaring, clanking places with the sun gnawing at their iron roofs,—and the pale, moist faces, the monotonously rapid hands.”
“Do you?” said Mrs. Dallas. She often said that, in that tone, when he gave expression to some enthusiasm or sympathy. She did not make him feel snubbed, but always, when she said, “Do you?” she made him feel young again, a little bewildered and a little sad. He imagined, to explain it in her, that people’s thoughts did not interest her, her woman’s intuition probing below their thoughts to their personalities. It was he, himself, with his heart full of devotion, that interested Mrs. Dallas. Yet it was not of him that she next spoke. “How is Marian?” she asked. “Is she painting to-day?”