“I think I am—narrow loyalties, but fierce ones,” I said. “But you haven’t answered my question.”
“About motoring? I don’t care much about it, you know. And there really wasn’t room enough for me.”
I knew there hadn’t been; but I was deliberately eschewing tact.
“Has Captain Thornton gone?” I inquired, knowing, also, that he hadn’t.
“No; Lady Vera is reading to him in the flagged garden,” said Mollie in the voice that showed me how little she had to learn about spiritual control. “Lady Vera is going to take him out for a run in her two-seater before dinner. He enjoys that a great deal more than the big car.”
“It’s far pleasanter, certainly,” I agreed. And I went on: “They are reading, you mean, in the dream-garden. You mustn’t forget that it’s a dream-garden—where one goes to be alone.”
She looked round at me quickly, and after a moment I saw that she faintly coloured. She said nothing, leaving it to me to follow up my graceless gibe. I was quite ready to follow it up.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, knitting the loops along the side of my heel, “Vera hardly ever is alone there. It’s always, with Vera, a solitude à deux. She’s not at all the sort of woman for real solitude. She is the sort of woman who likes to feel, or, rather, to look lonely and not to be alone.”
To this, after a pause, Mollie said: “She is very charming; Clive finds her very charming.” And, forced to it, apparently, by my crudity, she added, “Aren’t you fond of her, then?”
“No, I’m not; not particularly,” I said. “Especially not just now. Vera is not at her best, to my mind, when she is being angelic to young married men.”