Strone threw open the gate, and she passed through, her gray skirt trailing with a silken rustle across the short, green turf. She looked at him sideways languidly—how stupid the man was.
“I have been paying calls,” she said; “a dreary ordeal in the country. People expect you to play croquet or smell flowers, and have tea out of doors. So extraordinary. Life seems made up of people who live in London and have houses in the country, and people who live in the country and have houses in London. Such a wonderful difference, isn’t there?”
“I suppose so,” he answered.
Then there was a short silence. It was an event, this, so bewildering, so unexpected, that Strone was unable to recover himself. A new shyness held him speechless. Lady Malingcourt, who was wondering now if she rightly understood it, did nothing to help him.
Of the wonderful hour that followed Strone had a rather confused impression. Little by little his tongue became loosened, he initiated her into the mysteries of that very simple place his hermitage, and all unknown to himself, to that rather complex thing the man. She enthused over the one and affected to ignore the other, while with rare subtlety she threw into their talk a salt-like impetus in regard to his work that stung.
“I must go,” she said at last rising. “Remember that John is bringing me to have tea with you next Sunday. I have promised to take him to Lingford Grange to dine to-night.”
The man at her side stopped suddenly.
“Will you sing to them there?” he asked.
She did not answer at once. She was studying the picturesque incongruity of Strone with his surroundings, the contrast between his marvelous attire and his easy, fluent speech. Neither flustered nor assertive, he was unconscious of his quiet, strong mastery; encouraged to talk he talked; when opportunity came he was silent. She was filled with admiration of the man, the genius, the mechanic inventor who, his brother had told her, was to make a name that would live; and there stole to this blasé woman under the glancing sunlight a strange new feeling which she defined as interest.
“Why? You will not be there surely?”