He laughed.
"Do we ever tell each other our annoyances? I think we sit and look at each other, and discover them. That is much more appropriate."
"You take things too seriously," she went on; "my dear, they are really not worth it. That is my settled conviction."
She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of laughter"—a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic—in the decent drapery of her fictitious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her expressive eyebrows.
"You are wonderful," he exclaimed, after an interval, "wonderful; that was what I was thinking."
She smiled disinterestedly.
"Because you don't understand me? My dear, nothing is so easy as mystification; that is why I don't return the compliment. Yourself, you know, are not very intelligible to-night."
He looked away frowning, but without embarrassment; presently throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he remarked:
"I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can't. I am unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find Mary."
"Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary yet; smoke another cigarette."