Hugh made a short, silent calculation.
“I’ve been either seven or eight times,” he said. “Oh, do let’s go again together! I don’t believe you really appreciated it. Of course you liked it, but I don’t think you saw, in fact nobody can the first time, how heavenly it is, how fine! There is no play like it; it has a peculiar quality quite different from anything else. What a mind Andrew’s—I call him Andrew now because I feel I know him so well—must be. How I’ve intrigued to find out who he is. Perhaps, after all, he is some gray wise old Scotchman, like the people in the kail-yard school, who really has thought out the truth of things all alone up in Inverness or somewhere dreadful. And yet I don’t know; there are things in it that must have been written by a woman. But, on the other hand, there are things that must have been written by a man. Also Andrew Robb must be quite young, or he couldn’t have seen into the girl’s heart like that, and he must be quite old, or he couldn’t tell you what he saw.”
For one moment, Edith felt as if she had been overhearing remarks about herself, and was in honour bound to make her presence known. But she simply could not; she felt herself unable to stop Hugh, so irresistible was the desire to hear him talk to her so candidly with such huge appreciation, while she, listening, drinking it in, decking herself, as it were, in his phrases and praise, sat all the time secret.
“Oh, you should have heard my brother-in-law on the subject last night!” he continued. “His upper lip grew longer and longer, like Alice when she ate the mushrooms, as he talked about it. And he hadn’t seen the play, I may tell you, he had read a review of it. But——”
Hugh stopped, with amusement breaking from his eyes and the corners of his mouth. The impulse grew irresistible, and he threw back his head and gave a great crack of laughter.
“I know I can say these things to you,” he said, “because you will understand. If I didn’t tell somebody about it and laugh over it, I should get angry, which would be a pity. I nearly got angry last night, but then I promised myself to tell you this morning, and so instead I treasured it all up, occasionally drawing him on, though he didn’t need much of that.”
The infection of Hugh’s merriment could not but capture her, too, for Hugh’s description of the upper lip was gloriously apt.
“But you haven’t told me what he said yet,” she remarked.
“I know I haven’t. Oh, I wish laughing did not hurt so! Well, down came the upper lip, and he kindly sketched the outline of the play to me, to me, so that I should see, when the trappings and embellishments of scenery and character were removed, what the spirit of it really was. You may not believe he used that phrase, but he did. Trappings and embellishments of character! Just think it over. To proceed; it was quite unnecessary, and in this case it would be harmful to see the play, because he could read what it was about, and could also read between the lines. The moral of the play was that wives should fall in love with other men than their husbands, and that their husbands should commit suicide in order to allow them to gratify their passions. He said it in those very words, because I have an extraordinary memory when I attend.”
Mrs. Allbutt frowned.