“I know it,” said Nellie. “What about Peter? I adore Peter, by the way; don’t say anything horrid.”
A certain sense of shock came to Silvia. Peter had not, ever so remotely, been the subject to which she alluded. But when Nellie suggested him, he was flashed on the screen with disconcerting vividness.
“But I didn’t mean him at all,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about—about Mr. Mainwaring.”
“He wouldn’t like that,” said Nellie.
Silvia sat up. She had a perfectly clear conscience to endorse an immediate repudiation. What caused that suspicious, that questionable little leap of blood to her cheeks, was, indeed, not that she had been thinking of Peter, but that Nellie supposed she had.
“Oh, but this is quite silly!” she exclaimed. “Indeed, he wasn’t in my mind at all. Why should he be? I scarcely know him.”
Nellie knew that she had ceased for that moment to dazzle Silvia, to whom the suggestion that Peter had been in her mind was clearly unwelcome and unexpected. It might be true or it might not (so ran Nellie’s swift argument) that Silvia was not thinking of Peter at all; but that she should be ruffled—ever so delightfully—at the notion that she had been, constituted a symptom, did it not?... But it was enough to note that, and pass on at once to the easy task of dazzling Silvia again.
“You are too delicious,” she said. “Yes, I’m going to stick to my subject for a minute longer, which is you, since yours isn’t Peter. You’ve got the most lovely lack of self-consciousness, do you know? Of course you don’t, or you wouldn’t have it. But when I talk to other girls, we each think about ourselves. It’s like talking to a boy—not Peter, mind—to talk to you.”
Silvia made some gesture of deprecation.
“No, I will go on,” said Nellie. “Look at the glass I hold up to you, please. It isn’t only the lovely parties that you and your mother have given us that have polished up the rusty old season: it’s your quality—what shall I call it—wind and sun, sexlessness. You just move along like a spring day, with all your banners streaming, in the most entrancing glee. You’re absolutely insouciante, if you understand French.”