They had let her, they had allowed her, to come into the drawing-room to have the honour of making his acquaintance! She paused: the scene of their meeting developed in her mind. A girl had rushed into the schoolroom where she was reading, and had told her that she and one or two others were to go into the drawing-room to make themselves polite to this man, who was described as a great scholar and explorer. She had gone in shyly, and had shaken hands with him, and he had stared at her and, later, had turned his back on her; and, after he had gone, the headmistress had commended her manners as having been quiet, ladylike, and respectful. Respectful!
He was smiling at her when she looked up at him once more. “You were wrong about it being at your cousin’s,” he said.
Muriel felt as though she had been smacked. “Oh, I only suggested that,” she replied, witheringly, “to help you out. I didn’t really suppose that you knew her.”
“I know very few people,” he answered, unmoved. “I can’t afford the time. Life is such a ‘brief candle’ that a man has to choose one of its two pleasures—sociability or study: he can’t enjoy both.”
She looked at him curiously. He must have a tough hide, she thought, to be unruffled by a remark so biting as that she had made. For a moment she stared straight at him, her hand resting on her hip. Then she caught sight of herself in the great mirror against the wall, and her hand slipped hastily from its resting-place: her attitude had been that of a common Spanish dancing-girl. Her eyes fell before his.
“I’ll go and find the others,” she said, and turned from him.
As she did so Lord Blair hurried into the room. He was wearing a hot-weather suit of some sort of drab-coloured silk, straight from the laundry, where, one might have supposed, the trousers had been accidentally shrunk. His stiff and spacious collar, and his expansive tie, folded in the four-in-hand manner and fastened with a large gold pin, detracted from the sense of coolness suggested by his suit; but a rose in his buttonhole gave a comfortable touch of nature to an otherwise artificial figure.
“Ah, good morning, Muriel dear,” he exclaimed, giving her cheek a friendly but quite unaffectionate kiss. “You’ve had a lazy morning, eh? Feel the heat, no doubt. Yes? No? Ah, that’s good, that’s capital! Good morning Mr. Lane, or Daniel, I should say, since you permit it. I hope Muriel has been amusing you.”
“She has,” said Daniel, and Muriel blushed.
Rupert Helsingham entered the room; and, when he had made his salutations, Muriel turned to him with relief, strolling with him across to the windows through which the warm scented air of the garden drifted, bringing with it the drone of the flies and the incessant rustle of the palms.