He did not move away as she faced him nor did his look alter. Sad and attentive, it merely remained attached upon her, and if he felt any nervousness it showed itself only in the slight gesture of his forefinger passing meditatively along the edge of his moustache. It was she who spoke. “Well, Bevis?” she said gravely. Her look asked: “Have you anything to tell me?”
“Well, Tony,” he returned. He had, apparently, nothing to say.
She studied him for a moment longer, and then, with an added impatience—if anything so soft could so be called—walking away to an easy-chair before the fire, she said, “You think me very silly, I suppose.”
“Silly? Why?”
“Because of the window. My hating it.”
He came and leaned on the back of her chair, looking across her head up at the mantelpiece where a row of white fritillaries stood in tall crystal glasses, their reflections showing as if through a film of sea-water in the ancient mirror behind them. There had been white fritillaries among the flagged paths of the walled garden, and, finding them again, he recognized that they had been the only things he had felt uncanny there; for he had always felt them wraith-like flowers.
“I think you’d better wall it up, quite seriously, if you really hate it.” He repeated his former suggestion. “It would rather spoil the room. But I wouldn’t, if I were you, live with a discomfort like that—if it’s really a discomfort.”
The young woman beneath him laughed, a little sadly, if lightly. “How you suspect me.”
“Of what, pray?”
“Oh—of unconscious humbug; of unconscious posing. Of induced emotions generally. It’s always been the same.”