He could not see Toppie’s features, but he felt her more intent, and in her next words he saw that he had seemed to call Owen’s taste in question—as well as madame Vervier’s. “Wasn’t that only because you didn’t see enough of her? She was so much Owen’s sort.”
“It doesn’t follow she’d be mine, would it? Owen and I were really very different, weren’t we, Toppie, dear?”
“Yes; very different. But you always liked the same people. It surprises me—so much—that you shouldn’t like Alix’s mother.”
“But I didn’t say that, Toppie! ‘Liking’ isn’t the word. She is charming. She is too charming; that’s what it comes to.” Giles felt himself go forward to a new outlet. “Too much the woman of fashion; too sophisticated and highly flavoured for anyone so simple as I am. You know I am much simpler than Owen. He was a man of the world, and I, however long I live, will never be a man of the world. If one’s just the shambling, shabby, scholastic type one will never feel at home with brilliant, resourceful people. It’s as if”—Giles found the simile with satisfaction—“I liked rice pudding while Owen could appreciate caviare. Madame Vervier is caviare, as far as I am concerned.”
He glanced up at Toppie to see how she accepted the metaphor; but if she smiled it was with reserve. “You like me, Giles. I’m not caviare; but I’m not, I hope, rice pudding either.”
“No, you don’t come into such categories,” Giles smiled back. “If one could find a fruit that tasted of frost and sunlight, a fruit one could pick only at daybreak—golden, and chill and sweet—that would be you, Toppie. A sort of apple of the Hesperides—that one must sail and sail for ever and a day to find.”
Something that came into his voice made him stop suddenly. And Toppie, too, was silent for a moment. When she spoke it was carefully, as if guiding their steps away from a menace to their quiet.
“That’s a charming compliment, Giles,” she said. “I sometimes think, shambling and shabby though you call yourself, that you are a poet as well as a philosopher. But I’m sorry, you know, to feel madame Vervier lose by what I gain. Owen always wrote of her as someone he so wanted me to know. I can’t believe he’d have wanted me to know anyone who was worldly and luxurious and meretricious. I can’t help feeling that you must be unjust.”
Meretricious, luxurious, worldly? Was that the picture he had, all unwittingly, drawn for Toppie? The blood came to Giles’s face. It was to be displayed to his own eyes as disloyal. He saw madame Vervier’s figure standing against the great arch of the sky; he saw her rising up from the sea at dawn; he smelt the beeswax and seashells and cool, clean linen.
“But I don’t mean that at all,” he stammered. “I don’t think of her as any of those things. Nothing could be further from my mind.”