“Let us talk of you now. I have had an eye on you, you know, even when you disappeared into the Indian haze; you had just disappeared when I first came to London. I only heard of lofty things—scholarly distinction, diplomatic grace, exquisite indifference to the world’s prizes and to noisy things in general. It’s all true, I can see.”
“Well, I’m not indifferent to you,” said Gavan, smiling, tossing his appropriate bouquet.
She had at this another, but a sharper, of her penetrative pauses. It was pretty to see her, rather like a deer arrested in its careless speed, suddenly wary, its head high. And, in another moment, he saw that the quick flush, almost violently, sprang to her cheek. Turning her head a little from him, she looked away, almost as if his glib acceptance of a frivolous meaning in her words abashed her—and more for him than for herself; as if she suddenly suspected him of being stupid enough to accept her at the uglier valuation of those echoes he had heard. She had not meant to say that she was one of the world’s prizes, and she had perhaps meant to say, generously, that if he found her noisy she wouldn’t resent indifference. Perhaps she had meant to say nothing of herself at all. She certainly wasn’t on the stage, and in thinking her so he felt that he had shown himself disloyal to something that she, more nobly, had taken for granted. The flush, so vivid, that stayed made him feel himself a blunderer.
But, in a moment, she went on with a lightness of allusion to his speech that yet oddly answered the last turn of his self-reproach. “Oh, you are loyal, I am sure, even to a memory. I wasn’t thinking of particulars, but of universals. My whole impression of you was of something fragrant, elusive, impalpable. I never felt that I had a glimpse of really you. It was almost gross in comparison actually to see your name in the papers, to read of your fight for Camley, to think of you in that earthly scuffle. It was like roast-beef after roses; and I was glad, because I’m gross. I like roast-beef.”
He was grateful to her for the lightness that carried him so kindly over his own blunder.
“It was only the fragrance of the roast, too, you see, since I was defeated,” he said.
“You didn’t mind a bit, did you?”
“It would sound, wouldn’t it, rather like sour grapes to say it?”
“You can say it. It was so obvious that you might have had the bunch by merely stretching out your hand—they were under it, not over your head. You simply wouldn’t play the game.” She left him now, reaching her chair with a long stride and a curving, gleaming turn of her white skirts, suggesting a graceful adaptation of some outdoor dexterity. As she leaned back in her chair, fixing him with that look of cheerful hardness, she made him think so strongly of the resolute, winning type, that almost involuntarily he said, “You would have played it, wouldn’t you?”
“I should think so! I care for the grapes, you see. It’s what I said—you didn’t care enough.”