Esther's resentment, never very serious, melted away. In the end there was something attractive in his disposition to refuse even a sympathy which was too soft. She thought that she saw change there. Hard knocks had been chipping off a youthful veneer of sentimentality. But she would not have him impute a silly softness to Judith. "And Judith's not a crying woman. I know her," she said.
"I know. She's got no end of courage. That's why it's so queer."
"She thought your heart was broken, you see."
"Yes, but—well, I think she ought to know me better than that."
"Perhaps she doesn't always keep up with you," Esther suggested.
Rather to her surprise he let the suggestion go by, and did not seize the opportunity it offered of considering or discussing himself—his character and its development. Instead, he began to talk about the Marshalship once more, full of interest and pleasure in it, looking forward to the companionship of Sir Christopher, to seeing and learning, to the touches of old pomp and ceremony in which he was to assist, unimportantly indeed, but as a favourably placed spectator.
"I'm more grateful to you than I can say," he declared. "And not for the two guineas a day only!"
His gratitude gave her pleasure, but she could not understand his mood fully. Her nature moved steadily and equably on its own lines; so far as she could remember, it always had, aided thereto by the favouring circumstances of assured position, easy means, and a satisfactory marriage. She did not appreciate the young man's reaction after a long period of emotion and excitement, of engrossment in his personal feelings and fortunes. With these he was, for the moment, surfeited, and disposed, consequently, to turn on them a critical, almost a satiric, eye. The need of his mind now was for calmer interests, more impersonal subjects of observation and thought. He was looking forward to being a spectator, a student of other people's lives, acts, and conditions—he was welcoming the prospect of a period during which his mind would be turned outward towards the world. He had had enough of himself for the time being.
It was not, then, a moment in which he was likely to ask himself very curiously the meaning of Judith's tears, or to find in them much stuff to feed either remorse or vanity. He was touched, he was a little ashamed, though with twitching lips, as he contrasted them with his farewell to Ayesha Layard at approximately the same moment. But on the whole he felt relieved of a matter with which he had little inclination to occupy himself when Esther said, at parting, "I think on the whole you'd better not say anything to Judith about what I told you; she might be angry with me for giving her away."
Judith might well have thought herself betrayed by the disclosure which Esther had made in her irritated curiosity, in her resentful desire to confront the smiling young man with the pathetic picture of a girl in tears. When a woman says to a man, of another woman, "See how fond she is of you!" there is generally implied the reproach, "And you under-rate, you slight, you don't return, her affection." Such a reproach had certainly underlain the contrast Esther drew between Judith's tears and the smiles in which Arthur had presumably indulged during his talk with Ayesha Layard. But Arthur took the contrast lightly; it did not really come home to him; he did not seek to explore its possible meaning, the suggestion contained in it. Lightly too he seemed to have taken Bernadette's telegram—her recollection of him at a crisis of his fortunes, coming out of the silence and darkness in which her flight had wrapped her. Here was a thing which might surely have moved him to emotion, rousing poignant memories? But when Miss Ayesha Layard rather made fun of it, he had not minded! Even this account of what had happened—this faint adumbration of the truth—agreed ill with Esther's previous conception of him.