"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"Work and labour truly to get mine own living. As for the rest, really I haven't thought about it."
She wanted to ask him whether he still loved Ora Pinsent, whether he were waiting for her to come back to him, and still made that the great thing in his life. But she could find no words for these questions and no right in herself to ask them. The unuttered thoughts served only to check her sympathy for him; even if he did not look to Ora as the great thing in his future life, yet she had been so great in his past as to leave him not caring about the rest. "I'm hard at work, though," he said an instant after; it sounded as if he were seeking to defend himself.
Alice said something rather commonplace about the advantages of hard work; Ashley gave it the perfunctory assent it seemed to demand. Then came silence, and to both of them a sense that there was no more to be said between them.
In spite of this, perhaps because she would not acknowledge it, Alice asked him to dinner the next night, to meet the Bowdons and Bertie Jewett; he accepted with an odd sort of desire to make one of the family circle once again. His interest was mainly in Bertie; they sat on either side of Alice. Ashley's contempt for Bertie was now entirely for the type, and even there not very severe, for power of any kind extorts respect; it was in the main supplanted by the curiosity with which we look on people who are doing what we might have done had we so chosen, or been allowed by nature so to choose. There was a moment's pang when he perceived that Alice was more at ease and more comfortable in talking to Bertie; he was resigned to the change, but it was not very pleasant to look on at it in full operation. Irene, on his other side, allowed none of its significance to escape him; her glances pointed the moral; why she did this he could not understand, not tracing how part of her grudge against Ora attached to the man who had been so near and so much to Ora, and now recalled her so vividly to memory. Bowdon was polite to Lady Muddock, but far from gay. Merriment, animation, sallies of wit or chaff, a certain amount of what a hostile critic might call noisiness, had become habitual to Ashley in the society which he had recently frequented; he found himself declaring this little party very dull, overdone with good sense and sobriety, wanting in irresponsibility of spirit. He hinted something of this feeling to Irene Bowdon.
"Oh, we don't go in for being brilliant," she said with a double touch of malice; she meant to hit at Ora and Ora's friends, and also perversely to include herself in his hinted depreciation of the company; this she liked to do because the depreciation came, as she knew, from a recollection of Ora and Ora's sort of society.
"Being brilliant isn't in itself a crime," pleaded Ashley; "even if it were, it's so rare that there's no need for an exemplary sentence."
"Why don't you talk to Alice?" she whispered.
"She prefers to talk to Mr. Jewett."
"I'm glad it annoys you."