Then queerly and unexpectedly, but still honestly, her intellectual interest in herself, that cold egoism that was characteristic of another side of her, awoke.
"Yet it is interesting," she said, "because it is out of this sort of derangement that types and species come. For a million years the fish we call the sole had a headache because one of its eyes was slowly traveling through its head. For a million years man was uncomfortable where the tail once came, because it was drying up. For a million years there will be girls like me, poor wretches, and at the end there will be another type of woman, a third sex, perhaps, who from not caring about these things which Nature evidently meant them to care about have become different. And all the boys like Seymour will be approximating to the same type from the other side, so that eventually we shall be like the angels—"
"My dear, why angels?" asked Edith.
"Neither marrying nor giving in marriage. La, la! And I was saying only the other day to him that I wished to marry half-a-dozen men! What a good thing that one does not feel the same every day. It would be atrociously dull. But in the interval, it is lonely now and then for those of us who are not exactly and precisely of the normal type of girl. But if you have no heart, you have to follow your intelligence, to go where your intelligence leads you, and then wave a flag. Perhaps nobody sees it, or only the wrong sort of person, who says, 'What is that idiot-girl waving that rag for?' But she only waves it because she is lost, and hopes that somebody will see it."
Nadine laughed with her habitual gurgle.
"We are all lost," she said. "But we want to be found. It is only the stupidest who do not know they are lost. Well, I have—what is Hugh's word? ah, yes,—I have gassed enough for one morning. Ah, and there is the motor coming back from the station. I am glad that Hugh has not thrown Seymour out, and driven forwards and backwards over him."
The motor at this moment was passing not more than a couple of hundred yards off through the park which lay at the foot of the steep garden terraces below them. From there the road wound round in a long loop towards the house.
"I shall go to meet Hugh at once, and get it over," said Nadine; and thereupon she whistled so shrilly and surprisingly on her fingers, that Hugh, who was driving, looked up and saw her over the terrace. She made staccato wavings to him, and he got out.
"You whistled the octave of B. in alt," remarked Edith appreciatively.
"And my courage is somewhere about the octave of B. in profundis," said Nadine. "I dread what Hugh may say to me."