Wingrave reflected for a moment.
“You mean the lady with a stock of epigrams, and a green veil?” he remarked. “No! I do not find her entertaining.”
“Your neighbor at table then, Miss Packe?”
“If my affections have perished,” Wingrave answered grimly, “my taste, I hope, is unimpaired. The young person who travels to improve her mind, and fills up the gaps by reading Baedeker on the places she hasn’t been to, fails altogether to interest me!”
“Aren’t you a little severe?” Aynesworth remarked.
“I suppose,” Wingrave answered, “that it depends upon the point of view, to use a hackneyed phrase. You study people with a discerning eye for good qualities. Nature—and circumstances have ordered it otherwise with me. I see them through darkened glasses.”
“It is not the way to happiness,” Aynesworth said.
“There is no highroad to what you term happiness,” Wingrave answered. “One holds the string and follows into the maze. But one does not choose one’s way. You are perhaps more fortunate than I that you can appreciate Mrs. Travers’ wit, and find my neighbor, who has done Europe, attractive. That is a matter of disposition.”
“I should like,” Aynesworth remarked, “to have known you fifteen years ago.”
Wingrave shrugged his shoulders.