“You’re letting yourself go this evening! Hitherto you’ve been more subtle in trying to get at what I think—or thought—of Lucinda.” Mark my own subtlety here! I substituted “thought” for “think”; and what she had been trying to get at was not what I thought of Lucinda, but what I knew about her—if anything. But I meant to lead her on; I gave her a smile with the words.
“If you felt all that about it, I should have thought you’d have tried to get some explanation out of her—or him. Something to comfort the family! You yourself might have acted as a go-between.”
“But they vanished.”
“Oh, people don’t vanish so completely as all that!”
“There’s the war, you know. We’ve all been busy. No time for useless curiosity.” I did not advance these pleas in a very convincing tone.
She looked at me suspiciously. “You’ve never heard a word from either of them?”
I took it that she meant to ask if I had received any letters. “Never,” said I—upon the assumption, truthfully.
“Where do you suppose Arsenio Valdez is?”
“I don’t know where he is. Fighting for Italy, I suppose. He was bound to end by doing that, though, of course, he’s by way of being a tremendous Clerical. In with the Black Nobility at Venice, you see.”
“Nobility, indeed! A scamp like that!”