‘I fixed my standard for you, years ago, Mr. Arbuthnot. In the days when you used to thank me—me, a governess—for playing dance-music at Madame Benjamin’s, I had my convictions as to the place you would one day occupy in Art.’
At other times—on the morning, for instance, when we first saw the Arbuthnot trio in the garden of Miller’s Hotel—Linda remembered her aspirations as to the place her friend would, one day, hold in the House of Commons. But Gaston, if he noted the discrepancy, passed it generously over. Hard for a man to believe a charming woman insincere simply because she a little over-estimates his own genius!
‘Those light-hearted salad days! When I was with de Camors this afternoon——’
‘The effusive little Frenchman who so nearly kissed you?’
‘As long as I forgot the children, and the twelve stone of mamma, and the fact that de Camors himself is growing bald, I could have believed he and I were six-and-thirty again. Six-and-thirty used to be the sum of our joint ages.’
‘Do not talk of age. It is a subject about which a man may jest, while a woman just breaks her heart.’
And Linda extended towards him her thin adroit hands, clasped in a pose that she had studied, not unsuccessfully, as one of pained entreaty.
‘Women are younger, relatively, than men,’ answered Gaston, with the sincerity of his sex. ‘When I was two-and-twenty, Dinah’s age, I knew more of the world than I know now. Whereas my wife——’
‘Ah! your wife,’ interrupted Linda Thorne, the mask for a moment dropping, the voice hardening. ‘I was thinking of living, palpitating, flesh-and-blood women—inhabitants of a world where nothing is faultless save over-faultless perfection. I—I mean,’ she went on, rapidly recovering her self-control, ‘that at thirty (and I am past thirty, alas! who looks at me under broad daylight but must see it?)—at thirty a man is scarcely in the noonday sun—a woman already feels the breath of evening. Her one chill hope is—to grow old gracefully. Mrs. Arbuthnot is a girl still.’
‘And you—were a child when I first knew you in Paris,’ observed Gaston, cleverly quitting the dangerous territory across whose borders he has been betrayed. ‘How natural it seems, Mrs. Thorne, that we should be walking together, you and I, in the old country, with the old language round us again! Do you hear what the children are singing down on the sands yonder?’