"I can find her in a few minutes."
"Oh yes, if you look! Shall you be back to tea?"
"Yes, we'll be back to tea, Miss Vintry. Both of us—together!"
Isobel smiled lazily again. "Come, you are going to make an effort. Nothing of the laggard now!"
"Oh, that's the word you've been thinking suits me?"
"It really will if you don't get to the west wood soon."
"I'll get there—and be back—in half an hour."
The one thing he could not endure was that any woman—above all, an attractive woman—should find in him, Harry Belfield, anything that was ridiculous. She might chide, she might admire; laugh she must not, or her laugh should straightway be confounded. Isobel's hint that he had been a laggard in love banished, in a moment, the uncongenial prudence which he had been enforcing on himself.
She watched him with a contemptuous smile as he strode off on his quest. Why had she mocked, why had she hinted? In part for pure mockery's sake. She found a malicious pleasure in giving his complacency a dig, in shaking up his settled good opinion of himself. In part from sheer impatience of the simple obvious love affair, to which she was called by her situation to play witness, chaperon, and practically accomplice. It was quite clear how it was going to end—better have the end at once! Her smile of contempt had been not so much for Harry as for the business on which he was engaged; yet Harry had his share of it, since her veiled banter had such power to move him. But that same thing in him had its fascination; there was a great temptation to exercise her power when the man succumbed to it so easily. In this case she had used it only to send him a little faster whither he was going already; but did that touch the limits of it?
So she speculated within herself, yet not quite candidly. Her feeling for Harry was far from being all contempt. She mocked him with her "Meriton ideal," but she was not independent of the Meriton standard herself. To her as to the rest of his neighbours he was a bright star; to her as to them his looks, his charm, his accomplishments appealed. In her more than in most of them his emotions, so ready and quick to take fire, found a counterpart. To her more than to most of them indifference from him seemed in some sort a slight, a slur, a mark of failure. Unconsciously she had fallen into the Meriton way of thinking that notice from Harry Belfield was a distinction, his favour a thing marking off the recipient from less happy mortals. She had received little notice and little favour—a crumb or two of flirtation, flung from Vivien's rich table!