"You see, I promised to go to the Hayes," he said.
"Oh, nonsense! Send a note to say you have got to go to the concert. It's quite true; you have got to go."
"Of course, if I have got to—" said he slowly.
"That's right. It begins at three, doesn't it? No; don't say we can do both, because it is quite impossible. You're very good to me, Reggie."
Gertrude felt intensely relieved, but she could not have told why. There had been something in the conversation she had held with Reggie, six months before, on the subject of Eva, which remained in her mind, and gave her a sense, not of danger, but of distrust. A sensitive mind need not, usually is not, the most analytical, and for this reason, to apply analysis to her unwillingness to see Eva, would yield either no results, or false ones. There is an instinct in animals which enables them to discriminate between their friends and their foes, and the keener that instinct is, the more instantaneous it is in its working. The anatomist can tell us the action of the heart with almost absolute accuracy; he can say how the blood gets oxydised in the lungs, how it feeds the muscles and works the nerves—but the one thing he cannot tell us is, why it does so. And these instincts, like the action of the heart, can be noted and expressed, but the reason of their working we shall not know just yet. An action may be pulled to pieces like a flower, and divided into its component parts, and labelled with fifty crack-jaw names, but the life of the flower ceases not to be a delicate, insoluble mystery to us.
Reggie was very fond of music, but it was compatible, or rather essential, that his particular liking for it prompted him to say that Wagner seemed to him to be "awfully ugly." Nor was it such a far cry that he should assert, that same evening to Gertrude, that he had thought the "Overture to Tannhäuser" "awfully pretty."
Gertrude had been rather silent as they drove back. But something had prompted her to say to Reggie that evening, as they sat in the drawing-room before dinner:
"Ah! Reggie, I am so glad you are good."
Reggie's powers of analysis were easily baffled, and it is no wonder that he felt puzzled.