He looked rather startled.
"I mean," she continued calmly, "to make no more engagements at all; and you needn't either—unless you wish to?"
"I shall not wish to."
"I thought not! There's really nobody here you care about talking to except me, is there? And there's nobody in the world I'd willingly waste a word on if you were about. So there, that's settled!" she said with a little breath of satisfaction. "It's a good thing you're old enough to be my father, Stefan, or I suppose people would begin to talk about us. Still," she added, "I'm glad you're not eighty!"
Meeting her candid, clear, affectionate gaze, Nikolai managed to summon up a smile of his own that was quite grandfatherly.
CHAPTER XLIX
Joan was not the judge of human nature she fancied herself if she believed that a disparity in age would render gossip innocuous. The disparity was not as apparent as she believed. Nikolai was, in his dark, impassive way, a singularly handsome man, and the stories of his early ghetto life and later experiences made of him a romantic figure to more eyes than Joan's. In vain the Jabberwocks rallied around her to a girl. In vain Effie May, whose shrewd ears heard usually whatever was to be heard, even in her retirement, casually spread abroad the story of Mr. Nikolai's devotion to the first Mrs. Darcy.
Joan's attitude was discouraging to her most loyal friends. She seemed quite unaware that she was being defended and rallied around. It rather relieved her when invitations began to dwindle in number; she was thus saved the trouble of declining them. She entered into their growing solitude a deux with the same single-mindedness she had brought to bear upon her frivolous period, her domestic period, and her brief career of publicity; being one of those natures which can do only one thing at a time, and that very hard.
When she thought about their relationship at all, it rather pleased her to fancy that she was playing Mrs. Thrale to Nikolai's Dr. Johnson. Unfortunately the people about her were for the most part unaware of this classic relationship; and had they known of it would have doubtless regarded it with one eye knowingly closed.