As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.
‘Pallor suits you,’ he piped gallantly, and then added: ‘But do not carry it to extremes.’
‘Am I so pale, then?’ I faltered, trying to smile naturally.
I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined it like a connoisseur.
‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘What is the matter?’
Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, ‘Does she really live without love? What does she conceal?’ I have read this interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor’s freedom. Moreover, we had an affectionate regard for each other.
I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:
‘What is the matter?’
‘Love is the matter!’ I might have passionately cried out to him, had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:
‘I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.’