His first impression was of pleasure at her undeniable beauty, and he was glad to find himself placed between her and Mrs. Tregaskis at dinner. Frances and a couple of negligible young men completed the party.
The whole-hearted virility of Mrs. Tregaskis dominated the conversation, which at first was general, but Ludovic noted with a certain surprise that she no longer provoked in him anything but a detached amusement. That it was far otherwise with Rosamund he felt convinced. There was latent hostility in her every glance and gesture, and she diffused an atmosphere of discontent that affected Ludovic strangely.
“She gives one a sense of unrest,” he reflected disappointedly. “The little sister, now, though she, too, is self-centred, has stability and a certain amount of poise. But Rosamund is unbalanced.” He tried to translate the impression into physical terms. “It’s as though the chemical ingredients in a retort had been carelessly flung together, regardless of power or proportion, and the solution in consequence is a mere seething chaos—fine material wasted. But what a fool I am—she can’t be more than twenty. The solution is still to come.”
They talked about books, and he saw her grey eyes light up with eagerness. When she became impersonal she seemed to him wholly charming.
“It is her relation to humanity that is at fault,” reflected the psychologist.
“You have never been back to the Wye Valley since you were a child, have you?” he asked her.
“No,” she said briefly, and added with a candid impulse of unreserve, “I don’t want to go back there until I go back for good. The cottage is ours, you know, and one day Francie and I will go back there to live.”
“Is that your ideal?” he asked gently.
“Yes,” she answered, in the tone of one who seeks to convince herself.
Ludovic found himself wondering whether it was also the ideal of Frances. There was something which struck him as remote, almost austere, in her young personality, and it was almost with the sense of a presentiment confirmed that he heard from Bertha Tregaskis, later in the evening, of the disquieting tendencies of her ward.