Nellie looked more than ever at that moment like some exquisite wild presence of the woodlands, Dryad or Bacchante, delicate and subtle in face and limb and brain, and merely proto-plasmic in soul, a creature made for the bedazzlement and the undoing of man. Certainly she had woven her spells over Silvia again; the momentary check in the incantation, when she had attributed “Peter-thought” to her, had passed as swiftly as the shadow of one of those light clouds which drifted over the grass.
But at that moment, when she so bewilderingly shone out again, there formed itself in Silvia’s mind, as she tried to follow this injunction to think aloud, not the image of her at all, but of Peter. For if Nellie was divinely akin to the blossoming thickets and the shadows that were beginning to lengthen over the grass, making cool islands on which the deer were grazing now, he, too, would be no less harmoniously bestowed by this reflecting lake-side. It was not that either of them suggested rurality; no one, indeed, was more emphatically of the street and the ballroom and the complication of the city than they. But by some secret pedigree of soul they were of the house and lineage of the things that glowed and enjoyed and were lovely, and gave as little thought to yesterday as they took for to-morrow. All this, not catalogued in detail, but fused into a single luminous impression, passed through Silvia’s consciousness like the wink of summer lightning....
“As if it wasn’t difficult enough to think at all,” she said, “and as for thinking aloud, thinking articulately—if I’m to sum it up, ever so clumsily, it’s merely that I adore, with all the incense I’ve got, the thought of your happiness. It does matter so much to me, and ... and isn’t it noble fun to find someone who matters? Very few people really matter; I suppose little, silly, finite hearts like ours can’t take in many. But those who do matter must come right in, if they don’t mind. They mustn’t risk themselves by hanging about on the doorstep; they might catch cold. Aren’t I talking nonsense? It’s your fault for taking me into the country, for assuredly it has gone to my head. Where there’s a stifle of roofs and a choke of streets nobody matters and everyone is quite delightful. What a stupid word that is, and how expressive of a stupid thing.”
Silvia very deliberately shot off into the backwater of nonsense, so to speak, out of the main stream, for the sun was on the water, in this dazzle of Nellie’s personality, and she could not see towards what weir the hurrying river might be taking her. Very likely there was no weir; the glistening tide, running swift, would very likely spread out into some broad expanse of Peace-pools; but it was the brightness that prevented scrutiny.
By some flash of woodland instinct, by some uncanny perception, Nellie divined the cause of this retirement into the backwater of triviality. With a ruthlessness that rivalled Mrs. Wardour’s pursuit of desirable guests, she caught the rope of Silvia’s boat, so to speak, before she could tie it to the security of some overhanging branch, and shot it out into the main stream again.
“Yes, my dear,” she said, “you talk nonsense delightfully. Ah, I didn’t mean stupidly; I didn’t mean in the sense you had just labelled it with. I meant delightfully, charmingly. But just for a change after that delightful (now I mean stupid) London, we’re talking sense. You interested me indescribably just now. You said you were more in a boy’s key than a girl’s. What did you mean exactly?”
Silvia watched the receding shore to which she had hoped to tie up.... After all, what did it matter if there was a weir, not a Peace-pool down there in that dazzle of benignant sunshine? But there was another difficulty in the way of expression.
“I can’t really explain,” she said. “There are things so simple that no explanation is possible. If I said, ‘It is a hot day,’ and you told me to explain, I couldn’t. I could only say, ‘If you don’t feel it, if you don’t know what that means, I can’t help you.’ It’s the same with all elemental things.”
Nellie regarded her with eyes that were framed in some steely sort of interest; eyes that were eager to know not from the kindly tenderness of friends but from some surgical curiosity.
“I think I know what you mean by a ‘boy’s key,’” she said. “Let me see if I can explain you to yourself, Silvia, since you won’t—ah, can’t—explain yourself to me. If you were in love, for instance, you would passionately want to give love, to pour yourself out, instead of, like most girls, provoking love and permitting it and ever so eagerly receiving it. You wouldn’t want a man’s homage so much as you would want to be allowed to love him. You would want, and how queer and delicious of you—you lovely upside-down, inside-out creature.”