He drew forward a chair for Dinah; then, after standing for some appreciable time, and finding that she neither spoke to him nor looked at him, he seated himself, uninvited.
‘Awful shame, isn’t it, to interrupt you like this?’
‘It does not matter much, my lord. My time was occupied in nothing more important than counting stitches for a border—that dreariest form of feminine arithmetic,’ Dinah’s lips relaxed, ‘as my husband calls it.’
‘Does your husband say so really? Just what one might expect. All husbands are alike.’
Modelling his clay outside, Mr. Arbuthnot smiled good-humouredly to himself at the remark.
‘Now, to me—you mustn’t mind my saying so—lovely woman is never so lovely as when she is absolutely a woman! Dead against the higher education business—girl graduates—platform females—you know the style of thing I mean. Only one out of my tribe of sisters, Vic, the eldest, works at her needle—my favourite sister from my cradle.’
Rex Basire felt that he threw a shade of discriminative, yet unmistakable flattery into this avowal of family preference. Dinah held her peace, having in her possession none of those useful colloquial counters which less uninformed persons have agreed to accept as coin. Rex Basire’s generalisation about husbands lingered in her mind with unpleasant, with personal significance. Was it possible that Gaston’s coolness towards her had become matter of comment in the idle little world to which Linda Thorne and Lord Rex Basire both belonged?
‘I work at my needle,’ she remarked presently, ‘because I am not gifted enough to do better things. If I had talent, a tenth part of talent like Gaston’s, I should not spend my time counting threads of canvas.’
So the discriminative flattery had fallen through. Lord Rex tapped his exceedingly white teeth with the top of his cane. He searched diligently throughout the length and breadth of his brain for subject-matter, and found the land naked. His want of inspiration must, he began to think, be Mrs. Arbuthnot’s fault. These constant allusions to the absent husband were crushingly unsuggestive; tended, indeed, towards irksomeness. Arbuthnot was a well-looking man enough, of the usual American type, clever, possibly, in his way,—could knead up clay into droll little figures, and sing French songs without accent! It was distinctly not to listen to Gaston Arbuthnot’s praises that Lord Rex had toiled under a hot sun, and at this ‘unholy hour,’ from Fort-William Barracks up to Miller’s Sarnian Hotel.
He asked himself if Dinah were really as beautiful as during the past two days and nights she had appeared before him in his dreams? With a world full of charming women, most of them disposed, thought Lord Rex, to value one adequately, were this particular woman’s good graces high enough stakes to be worth playing for?