“They talk about things which couldn’t possibly happen, just as if they were real. So silly!”
Wilbraham quickly looked away.
“It is provoking, sometimes,” said Teresa. “One gets mixed, at least I do.”
She glanced at Wilbraham, not at all understanding what was in his mind, but wishing that he would be more genial, more natural. Certainly she was getting nervous herself, for she had never been so conscious of Sylvia’s deficiencies. They had never before seemed sufficiently important to weigh against her beauty and sweetness. Now the little prosaic vague speeches disturbed her quite unduly.
She put herself yet more on the defensive.
They wandered round that imperial hill where memories jostle each other, and even under the divinely blue Roman sky great angry ghosts rise and stare at the petty intruders whom, in life, one hand-wave would have swept away. They sat on a bank, where, behind them, towered the brick fragment which may have looked on the trial of an apostle, and, before, lay that little space of crowded ruin of which each stone holds history. Teresa, foolish short-sighted Teresa, thinking only how best to shield and show off another, was at her best and brightest, touched each point with delicate fancies, twisted Sylvia’s inanities into playfulness, was delightful towards Wilbraham. She was a little surprised at last when he sprang up.
“I must be off,” he said briefly.
“Look here; shall I put you into a carriage, or do you mean to stop longer?”
“Oh, we will go,” answered Teresa, reflecting ruefully that she could not have been very successful in her valiant attempts to make the afternoon pleasant to him, when he ended it in such an abrupt fashion. But Sylvia drove home in excellent spirits.
“I like you to come with us, because Walter likes to talk to you,” she said cheerily. “You understand him better now, don’t you? I know he enjoyed himself this afternoon.”