Once again intimacy, like the flash of summer lightning, broke the cloud. It had moved nearer.
“Yes, I listened to you singing that bad child to sleep,” she continued; “and I saw you through the chink of the door. I thought it very nice of you. I liked you for it.”
Hugh had sat down on the edge of the grass when she took the garden-seat. And at that he looked up at her quickly, and met those dark kind eyes.
“Thank you,” he said.
At that moment she also knew that the flash of summer lightning was there. She knew that there was attraction and fire in the atmosphere. And she behaved as one who wished to get home, out of range of these elements, before the storm came nearer. Alone, in the house, with the blinds drawn down, she would be secure, with the security that she had sought in coming down to this peaceful, meadow-encompassed house, where the nearest and loudest sounds of life were the drowsy drone of the folk in Mannington who were so unabsorbingly busy over provincial interests. Here she could be busy herself over her garden and her writing, wanting no more, and quite content with this calm sunrise on her wreck. Yet even at the moment when she said to herself that she wished just to pull the blinds down and sit by her solitary fireside, she knew that she wanted to pull them up, and look, nothing more, into the open night. In any case she did not show her desire to him.
“Yes, that is what Peggy and I both felt,” she said. “We both wanted you to use your time. Of course people like to see you, and ask you to dinner and to Saturdays till Mondays, and it is all so pleasant, and there is amusing talk, and plans, and another party next Tuesday week. But I do feel that anybody who can do something, ought to do it, and not make the mere distraction and froth of life into life. Most people can’t do anything particular. Well?”
Hugh had looked up again, clearly with words on his tongue.
“But you,” he said. “Of course you could do something; one feels that every moment that one is with you. You have just as much force as Peggy—she told me to call her Peggy, by the way; don’t you hate people who allude to others by their Christian names, when they don’t use them to them?”
“Yes, I loathe them. About me?”
“You, you have force; you understand, which is force. If we have all got to do something, why not set us an example. You don’t even kill slugs.”