In silence, for I would not be at the trouble of asking what it was I was to praise and encourage, I turned up my collar and fastened the little strap across the front. She, seeing I had no further intention of talking, began to get ready too for the plunge out into the rain.
“You’re not angry, Baron dear?” she asked, leaning across and looking into as much of my face as appeared above the collar.
This mode of addressing me was one that I had never in any way encouraged, but no amount of stiffening at its use discouraged it. In justice, I must remind you who have met her that her voice is not disagreeable. You will remember it is low, and so far removed from shrillness that it lends a spurious air to everything she says of being more worth listening to than it is. Edelgard described it fancifully, but not altogether badly, as being full of shadows. It vibrated, not unmusically, up and down among these shadows, and when she asked me if I were angry it took on a very fair semblance of sympathetic concern.
I, however, knew very well that the last thing she really was was sympathetic—all the aptitude for sympathy the Flitz family had produced was concentrated in her gentle sister—so I was in no way hoodwinked.
“My dear lady,” I said, shaking out the folds of my cloak, “I am not a child.”
“Sometimes I think,” said she, getting up too, “that you are not enjoying your holiday. That it’s not what you thought it would be. That perhaps we are not a very—not a very congenial party.”
“You are very good,” said I, with a stiffness that relegated her at once to an immense and proper distance away, for was not this a tending toward the confidential? And a man has to be careful.
She looked at me a moment at this, her head a little on one side, considering me. Her want of feminine reserve—conceive Edelgard staring at a living gentleman with the frank attention one brings to bear on an inanimate object—struck me afresh. She seemed absolutely without a vestige of that consciousness of sex, of those arrière-pensées (as our conquered but still intelligent neighbours say) very properly called female modesty. A well brought up German lady soon casts down her eyes when facing a gentleman. She at once recollects that she is a woman and he is a man, and continues to recollect it during the whole time they are together. I am sure in the days when Mrs. Menzies-Legh was yet a Flitz she did so, but England had blunted if not completely destroyed those finer Prussian feelings, and there she stood considering me with what I can only call a perfectly sexless detachment. What, I wondered, was she going to say that would annoy me at the end of it? But she said nothing; she just gave her head a little shake, turned suddenly, and walked away.
Well, I was not going to walk too—at least, not with her. The ruins were not my property, and she was not my guest, so I felt quite justified in letting her go alone. Chivalry, too, has its limits, and one does not care to waste any of one’s stock of it. No man can be more chivalrous than I if provided with a proper object, but I do not consider that objects are proper once they have reached an age to be able to take care of themselves, neither are they so if Nature has encrusted them in an armour of unattractiveness; in this latter case Nature herself may be said to be chivalrous to them, and they can safely be left to her protection.
I therefore followed at my leisure in Mrs. Menzies-Legh’s wake, desiring to return to the camp, but not desiring to do it with her. I thought I would search for Frau von Eckthum and she and I would walk back happily together; and, passing under the arch leading into what had been the banqueting hall, I immediately found the object of my search beneath an umbrella which was being held over her head by Jellaby.