"Finish it, Edward," she said; "it is the last you will get from my garden this year, and what an amusing conversation we are having about Elizabeth and you! Elizabintermezzo—the intermezzo which Elizabeth plays! What a good word! Quite a portmanteau!"
All this private signalling of Edward to her, all his double-edged questions as to whether she had forgiven him, seemed to Elizabeth in the worst possible taste. She had just now announced, so frankly that she could not be imagined to be serious, that he had behaved caddishly that afternoon, and his behaviour now seemed to endorse her judgment. And yet she, by her outspokenness perhaps, had set the fashion of double-edged speech; it was justifiable in him to think that she meant to allude to what neither of them openly alluded to. But he was caddish; she felt irritated and disgusted with him. She looked at him with eyebrows that first frowned and then were raised in expostulation.
"Haven't we all had enough of my practice this afternoon?" she said.
As she looked at him she noticed what she had noticed a hundred times before, how his hair above his forehead grew straight and then fell over in a plume. And while her mind was ruffled with his behaviour, she suddenly liked that enormously. She wondered if it was elastic, that thickness of erect hair, like a spring-mattress; she wanted to put her hand on it. And that radical and superficial emotion called physical attraction had begun—superficial because it concerns merely the outward form and colour of face and limbs, radical because all the sex-love in the world springs from its root which is buried in the beating heart of humanity. Afterwards, no doubt, those roots may dissolve and become part of the life-blood, red corpuscles of love, but without them there has never yet opened the glorious scarlet of the flowers of passion, nor the shining foliage that keeps the world green.
Thus, at the very moment when he was indifferent to her except that she was a little nauseated by his behaviour, he began to become different to all others, and very faintly but authentically it was whispered to her that he and she "belonged," that they fitted, entwined and interlacing, into this great Chinese puzzle of a world. Instantly she shut her ears to the whisper. But she had heard it.
He had the decency, she allowed, to change the subject.
"No encore for the intermezzo," he said; "but 'Siegfried' is being given this day week, and I have got a box for it. I want you all to come."
"Well, that would be a treat," said Mrs. Hancock. "These are the first white-heart cherries we've had from the garden, Edward. You must take some! 'Siegfried!' That is by Wagner."
Elizabeth banished from her mind caddishness and springy hair alike.
"Oh, Aunt Julia!" she exclaimed.