The dining room was big enough to reduce the immense pieces of Georgian silver—beautiful they were—to reasonable proportions.
St. John said there were some very fine pieces of Queen Anne which he would show her.
"There was," she murmured, "nothing like Queen Anne."
The attentiveness of the footman and even of the butler did not seem to her to be entirely confined to their wants.
St. John asked her questions about India, which she answered as she answered travelling Europeans—correctly, concisely, and without any frills of vocabulary. It was quite possible, she reflected, that St. John wanted to know the answers to his questions. That was the worst of being abroad so much, you were always either trying to tell things it bored people to hear, or else they were determined to hear things that it bored you to tell. Her mind wandered to the curious tide-like quality of interest, the way it advanced and retreated in a conversation.
St. John was explaining what a quiet life he had led. Perhaps, to her, it would have even seemed dull. (This to him was rhetorical paradox, and to her an obvious truth.) She did not know, he said, what it meant to feel that the land belonged to you—to see your own flowers growing, your own calves being born—to feel yourself surrounded by your own people, for whose happiness and welfare you were responsible.
Ariadne said that inheritance was a sacred trust (it was wonderful how easy she found it to talk like St. John).
"Yes," he said, "that is just it—a sacred trust. Why, I hardly ever go up to London now, and when I do, I feel quite homesick till I get here again."
They got up from dinner.
"Shall we go and sit in the library?" he said.