She was a little surprised at his gambit and could think of nothing but a kindly murmur.
“Detestable thing,” he said; “my body.”
“But surely not,” she tried and felt as she said it that was a trifle bold.
“You’re all right,” he said making her aware he saw her. “But I’ve this thing that wheezes and fattens at the slightest excuse and—it encumbers me—bothers me to take exercise.... But I can hardly expect you to be interested in my troubles, can I?”
He made an all too manifest attempt to read her name on the slip of card that lay before her among the flowers and as manifestly succeeded. “We people who write and paint and all that sort of thing are a breed of insatiable egotists, Lady Harman. With the least excuse. Don’t you think so?”
“Not—not exceptionally,” she said.
“Exceptionally,” he insisted.
“It isn’t my impression,” she said. “You’re—franker.”
“But someone was telling me—you’ve been taking impressions of us lately. I mean all of us people who go flapping ideas about in the air. Somebody—was it Lady Beach-Mandarin?—was saying you’d come out looking for Intellectual Heroes—and found Bernard Shaw.... But what could you have expected?”
“I’ve been trying to find out and understand what people are thinking. I want ideas.”