Steerforth in his room, I heard her dress rustle in the little gallery outside. When he and I engaged in some of our old exercises on the lawn behind the house, I saw her face pass from window to window, like a wandering light, until it fixed itself in one, and watched us. When we all four went out walking in the afternoon, she closed her thin hand on my arm like a spring, to keep me back, while Steerforth and his mother went on out of hearing: and then spoke to me.
“You have been a long time,” she said, “without coming here. Is your profession really so engaging and interesting as to absorb your whole attention? I ask because I always want to be informed, when I am ignorant. Is it really, though?”
I replied that I liked it well enough, but that I certainly could not claim so much for it.
“Oh! I am glad to know that, because I always like to be put right when I am wrong,” said Rosa Dartle. “You mean it is a little dry, perhaps?”
Well, I replied; perhaps it was a little dry.
“Oh! and that’s a reason why you want relief and change—excitement, and all that?” said she. “Ah! very true! But isn’t it a little ——Eh?—for him; I don’t mean you?”
A quick glance of her eye towards the spot where Steerforth was walking, with his mother leaning on his arm, showed me whom she meant; but beyond that, I was quite lost. And I looked so, I have no doubt.
“Don’t it—I don’t say that it does, mind I want to know—don’t it rather engross him? Don’t it make him, perhaps, a little more remiss than usual in his visits to his blindly doting—eh?” With another quick glance at them, and such a glance at me as seemed to look into my innermost thoughts.
“Miss Dartle,” I returned, “pray do not think—”
“I don’t!” she said. “Oh, dear me, don’t suppose that I think anything! I am not suspicious. I only ask a question. I don’t state any opinion. I want to found an opinion on what you tell me. Then, it’s not so? Well! I am very glad to know it.”