Parker came up after a time to say that Mrs. Latimer had called to see him; but even at this Stacey felt nothing save a little surprise.
He went down at once and greeted Mrs. Latimer pleasantly. She looked, he thought, rather worn, faintly older; but he said to himself that this was probably the effect of the cruel morning light. Moreover, as soon as she spoke and smiled, the impression vanished, as carelessly as it had come.
“Of course you don’t want to see me or you’d have come to my house,” she said, “but I really wanted to see you, so I couldn’t resist coming. Silly, wasn’t it?”
“Not at all,” he replied. “An excellent idea. What the Italians call geniale. Piquant, too, with just a touch of impropriety about it, since if we had been of the same age we’d undoubtedly have married.”
He was merely saying words, letting them say themselves, but Mrs. Latimer flushed like a girl. “Stacey!” she cried. “Shame on you!”
“Come on up to my study, if you don’t mind climbing the stairs,” he suggested. “That will make it still worse.”
She laughed, and they went up. But when they had sat down they both became silent.
“How’s Marian and the new ménage?” Stacey asked, after a moment.
Mrs. Latimer gave him a quick curious glance, but there was nothing except polite interest in his face and tone. Nor, indeed, was there more than that in his thoughts. He asked after Marian because she had been recalled to his mind the night before and because Mrs. Latimer was her mother.
“To tell the truth, I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t think Marian is particularly happy, but then I don’t think she ever was. Marian is enigmatic because she has two such different sides to her nature that neither can be the truth about her. And what that truth is, I, for one, have long since given up trying to discover. Marian seems to me to drift, rather carelessly and recklessly, as though she were saying: ‘What does it matter? It’s not really I who am drifting.’ ”