‘Not a word,’ Paul answered.
‘If you are quite sure of that, Mr. Armstrong,’ said the lady, ‘we can pursue our talk in peace; but there is nothing so disconcerting as to dread an eavesdropper when one is exchanging confidences.’
Paul had not, so far, begun to exchange confidences, and he rather wondered in his own bourgeois mind if this fascinating lady were offering him a challenge to a flirtation. It might very well have appeared, so thought the Exile who recalled these things with so clear an after-light upon them, that the lady had that object, and no other; but for the moment there was a natural embarrassment in thinking so.
‘You have written verse, Mr. Armstrong?’ asked the Baroness.
‘Reams,’ Paul answered, with a laugh, though he was not entirely at his ease.
‘Oh,’ said the lady, ‘you must show me some of it; you must show it to me all. I am sure, from your prose, that you have the true singing gift; and when one can both think and sing, one is a poet, you know, Mr. Armstrong.’
‘I have nothing to show,’ Paul answered; ‘I have burnt all my poor stuff long and long ago.’
‘And you write no longer?’ she asked—‘you write verse no more? Oh, but that is wicked—it is criminal to have the gift and not to use it ‘But then, of course, one knows how much depends upon congeniality of surrounding and society. There have been times when I have thought that my own poor little pipe was silenced for ever. It is so easy to lose heart; it is sometimes so very difficult to retain one’s courage and animation. Do the gentlemen remain here, by-the-by, to smoke, Mr. Armstrong?’
There was a something odd in the way in which she used his name—a something not at all easy to be defined—and it influenced Paul strangely every time she spoke it. It was not altogether unlike a caress, if one could associate an idea of that sort with the manner and meaning of a great lady with whom one had not exchanged a word until within the last half-hour. Paul knew not what to make of the grand dame; but she fluttered and flattered him prodigiously, and in his excitement the troubles which had seemed so chokingly bitter so brief a time ago were all for the moment forgotten.
‘They sit about the table for an hour or two after dinner,’ Paul responded, in answer to her last question.