‘That is more like a speech of Lord Rex Basire’s than of yours!’ cried Dinah, with a laugh unlike her own. ‘Throw in a lisp, varnished shoes, a waistcoat, and a double eyeglass, and I could believe it was his lordship, not Geff Arbuthnot, who was condescending to talk to me.’
‘You must have put forth all your charity, have exercised a great deal of wasted patience, in allowing his lordship to condescend at all.’
Chiefly through Gaston’s spirited character sketches over the breakfast table, Geoffrey had long ago known with certainty what manner of man Lord Rex Basire was. Instead of answering, Dinah stooped above a head of garden lilies, the dense white of whose petals showed waxen and spotless through the gloom.
‘I like the smell of lilies better than of all other flowers that blow,’ so after a minute her rich low voice came to Geoffrey; ‘I can never smell them, nor yet lavender, without thinking of Aunt Susan’s garden at Lesser Cheriton.’
Where Geff first saw her! The garden amidst whose crowding summer verdure he stood at the moment when his youth went from him, when Dinah and Gaston, hand clasped in hand, bent towards each other in the level sunlight. At this hour, with the whispers of a new love stirring in his heart, Geoffrey Arbuthnot could not hear that distant time spoken of, above all by Dinah’s lips, without a thrill of the old passion, the old maddened, blinding sense of loss overcoming him.
‘It might have been well for some of us,’ he began, ‘if we had never heard the name of Lesser Cheriton——’
But Dinah interrupted him quickly:
‘No, Geoffrey, I can never believe that. If it means anything, it must mean I had better not have married Gaston. I should have no hope, no religion—I should be a woman ready for any desperate action—if I thought that my life, just as I have it, was not the one God had cut out for me as best. The fact is, you know, I have been too narrow,’ she went on hurriedly. ‘Something has been running in my mind all this evening—some idle talk of Lord Rex Basire’s that I may repeat to you another time; and I begin to see my conduct in a new light. From the day Gaston married me I have been too narrow, far.’
‘In what way? Give me one or two specimens of your overnarrowness.’