“And you?”
“Oh, I think he’s only kicking against the pricks. He can’t think like that.”
I gave her a look which I tried to make significant. “You mean that he’s taking the indirect method?”
She gazed off to the other side of the room. “Oh, that isn’t the indirect method.”
“What does the indirect method involve?”
But here Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott butted in—I have no other term for it—with a question, which she asked as if her life depended on the answer, “Regina, didn’t you think the action of that English nurse in going over the mountains with the band of little Serbian boys the most heroic thing you ever heard of?”
So I came away without having learned what it was I was doing, but not less determined to find out.
I resolved to try Cantyre. My meetings with him had become not exactly rare, but certainly infrequent. I had hardly noticed the decline of our intimacy while it was going on; I only came to a sudden realization of it when I said to myself I would look in on him that night.
It occurred to me in the first place that I had not looked in on him of my own accord since I had come home. I had gone round the elbow of the corridor once or twice when he had invited me, but never of my own initiative. Then it struck me that it was some time since he himself had come knocking at my door.