“Oh, almost everything!” he said.
“I sincerely congratulate you,” said she. “There is no gift so enviable as that of liking.”
Mrs. Allbutt, as Hugh noticed for the second time and more emphatically than before, had a voice of singular charm, and to him, to whom the ear was the main organ of communication between his soul and that of things external to him, it seemed a voice of wonderful temperament. It was very level in tone, and pitched on rather a low note for woman, but the quality of it was fine, clear but a little veiled, as if it came from really inside her brain, not from her throat merely. Her utterance, too, had great distinction; there was nothing slurred or clipped about it, the words stood up like flowers in a field, and her personality gave them its significance; what she said was no echo of other voices; it was genuine, personal, as much hers as her face or her cool long-fingered hands. Even had she talked mere gibberish her voice would have been a thing to listen to for the melody of it; as it was, its music was but the accompaniment to her thought so delightfully made audible. At the moment, however, while these very simple and sincere sounds still dwelt on his ear like song, Peggy, gorgeously though so hastily attired, came in with a rush, snapping a bracelet on to her wrist.
“Ah, but if only the Government would bring in an eight-hour day for the upper classes,” she cried, “how I would work for them—Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, whatever they were! I have been on the warpaths of charity since nine this morning, which makes ten hours already, and if you think I have done yet—why, you’re mistaken. I have been mistaken too, because I find that my ladyship is at home at eleven, and I quite forgot. So you’ll come back with us, Hugh, won’t you, after the theatre? Can’t you? How tiresome of you! There’s going to be no dancing, but we are going to talk to each other for an hour. And at twelve a glass slipper of rather large size is coming for me, and I’m going to a ball. I wish I was dead!”
“No, dear, you don’t,” said Edith.
“Anyhow, why?” asked Hugh.
“Because I shan’t want to go out again, and I must. But one knows quite well that one enjoys everything when one is doing it. I even enjoyed my dentist yesterday, because he is a Christian Scientist and told me I had no nerves in my teeth, and even if I had they wouldn’t hurt, because mortal mind, as far as I understood him, did not really exist.”
“Then there should have been no teeth either,” remarked Hugh.
“I thought of that too, but my mouth was full of syringes and syphons and pads of cotton-wool so that I couldn’t talk. Oh, yes, doing things is always pleasant, whatever they are! Now you, Hugh, won’t do things.”
Hugh nodded at her.