She laughed.
“My dear, order your car, will you? and take your header on your return. But don’t ask Gracie to go with you, because she would certainly say ‘Yes,’ and I want her here for moral support.”
“Very well. I feel no qualm about not offering you my moral support, because you would find me a broken reed.”
He looked round the great cool loggia a moment.
“Dear me, Grote’s ancestors were thieves with a great deal of taste,” he observed.
He drifted away in a rather rudderless manner, lost in subtle speculations on the subject that had been under discussion. Much the most interesting of these was Lady Grote herself, for whom he entertained the greatest admiration and the strongest affection of which he was capable. That, though it lacked any ardent quality, was undoubtedly deep; its very quietness almost guaranteed that. His pulses never beat quick for anybody, but for his friends they beat most satisfactorily full. Passions of any sort, whether of temper or of temperament, were quite unknown to him: his analytic mind lived in a cool, pleasant cave with its affections grouped tidily round it, and his admirable conscience keeping a sort of sentry-go at the mouth of it, to call him out, when required, for the fulfilment of his public duties. But the moment they were over, it saluted, and let him bestow himself at ease again.
He seldom was surprised at anything, for if anything at all startling came across him, he always felt that a better knowledge of the soil from which it sprang would have enabled him to conjecture its existence. He had been unaware, for instance, until to-day, that Lady Grote was one of the cataclysmic party, whose bogies, whenever they appeared in the public Press, he looked at with mild and easily-satisfied curiosity. The future of Ireland was of these, labour trouble was another; even suffragettes were periodically supposed to contribute a menace to the tranquillity of this decently-ordered realm, or the possibility of a European war. Lady Grote had not said which of these she thought threatening, but she had spoken of the melting-pot being on the fire....
He found himself standing in the drawing-room in front of the great Vandyck picture of the Lady Grote of the period, who had been an ancestress of his own. Not till then did he remember that he had come indoors to order a motor-car—had he driven down from London in his own car that morning? He could not recollect whether he had or not, and pressed a bell to order it if it was here, and, if not, one of his hostess’s. Waiting for it to be answered, he continued looking vaguely at the antique Lady Grote and thinking of the modern one.
How baffling to the analyst was the vivid and flame-like quality of her mind! No desire for the brooding activity of thought ever touched her; she was always eager for experience and psychical adventures in living; she loved coming in contact each day with new minds; she explored them like a traveller in unknown lands, but made no maps of them, no notes even of the fresh flora and fauna. She must be forty years old now, and yet in eagerness and elasticity of mind, just as in her fresh youth of body, she showed no signs of age and of the mellowness that age brought with it. She had still about her all the delicious effervescence and experimentalism of youth: her life was passed in the foam of rapids, and never by any chance did she float into a back-water. Time, with the buffetings and adventures that it brought, wrote no wrinkles on her, nor ever so slightly bruised her: the very quality of her vitality, like a wind, swept away catastrophes from her path in a mere cloud of dust.
He never made inquiries into the truth of scandals about his friends; such things did not interest him, but for as long as he had known her the world’s tongue had never ceased wagging about her affairs. Whatever they had been, they had in no way coarsened her or made her common: she remained the high-bred, exquisite woman, perched on a pinnacle of what he must suppose was called social standing. His passion for analysis did not trouble to exert itself over what that meant. In this prosperous, thoughtless, democratic day there was no end to the ingredients which composed it. She was a power, a centre, a comet....