But Vida only said, 'Yes. It's a good scheme of colour.'
She sat on the rustic seat while Lady John explained to Lord Borrodaile, whose gardens were renowned, how she and Simonson treated this and that plant to get so fine a result. Filey had lost no time in finding a place for himself by Miss Levering, while Hermione trailed dutifully round the garden with the others. Occasionally she looked over her shoulder at the two on the seat by the sunken wall—Vida leaning back in the corner motionless, absolutely inexpressive; Filey's eager face bent forward. He was moving his hands in a way he had learned abroad.
'You were rather annoyed with me,' he was saying. 'I saw that.'
The lady did not deny the imputation.
'But you oughtn't to be. Because you see it's only because my ideal of woman is'—again that motion of the hands—'what it is, that when I see her stepping down from her pedestal I——' the hands indicated consternation, followed hard by cataclysmic ruin. 'Of course, lots of men don't care. I do. I care enormously, and so you must forgive me. Won't you?' He bent nearer.
'Oh, I've nothing to forgive.'
'I know without your telling me, I feel instinctively, you more than most people—you'd simply loathe the sort of thing we were talking about at tea—women yelling and fighting men——'
'Yes—yes, don't go all over that.'
'No, of course I won't,' he said soothingly. 'I can feel it to my very spine, how you shrink from such horrors.'
Miss Levering, raising her eyes suddenly, caught the look Hermione cast backward as Lady John halted her party a moment near the pansy-strip in the gorgeous yellow carpet spread out before them.