He drawled out—
“The Life, dear lady? Enlighten our darkness.”
“That,” came the murmur behind him, “is precisely what she is going to do. How dense you are, Jasper!”
And at the same moment from Miss Howe—
“Be quiet, you two! Tell us, Anita! A life of her? Is that it? Ah, well, I always suspected your note-book. Did she know you Boswellized?”
“She?” There was the strangest mixture of scorn and admiration in the voice. “As if one could let her know! That was the difficulty with Madala Grey: she wouldn’t take herself seriously. She had—” a pause and a search for the correct word—“what I can only call a perverted sense of humour. If she’d known that I—noted things, she’d have been quite capable of falsifying all her opinions, misrepresenting herself completely, just to—throw me out, as it were. Not maliciously, I don’t mean that. But she teases,” finished Anita petulantly. “She will do it. She laughs at the wrong things. Of course she’s young still.”
“Yes, she’s young—now. She stays young now. She gains that at least,” said the woman in the shadows.
Anita made a quick little sound, half titter and half gasp.
“Oh!” she cried—and her voice was as grey as her face—“I forgot. Do you know—I forgot! It’s going to be ghastly. I believe I shall always be forgetting.”
I glanced up at Kent Rehan. It made me realize that I had been listening with anxiety, that I was afraid of their expressive sentences. They had words, those writing people. They knew what they thought: they could say what they thought: and what they thought could hurt. I didn’t want him to be hurt. I said, under my breath—