“Then why did you come here to ask me about it?” demanded Maxwell Hartington, beginning to rub the other eye in an audible and unpleasant manner.
§5
When at last Mr. Brumley was face to face with Lady Harman again, a vast mephitic disorderly creation of anticipations, intentions, resolves, suspicions, provisional hypotheses, urgencies, vindications, and wild and whirling stuff generally vanished out of his mind. There beside the raised seat in the midst of the little rock garden where they had talked together five years before, she stood waiting for him, this tall simple woman he had always adored since their first encounter, a little strange and shy now in her dead black uniform of widowhood, but with her honest eyes greeting him, her friendly hands held out to him. He would have kissed them but for the restraining presence of Snagsby who had brought him to her; as it was it seemed to him that the phantom of a kiss passed like a breath between them. He held her hands for a moment and relinquished them.
“It is so good to see you,” he said, and they sat down side by side. “I am very glad to see you again.”
Then for a little while they sat in silence.
Mr. Brumley had imagined and rehearsed this meeting in many different moods. Now, he found none of his premeditated phrases served him, and it was the lady who undertook the difficult opening.
“I could not see you before,” she began. “I did not want to see anyone.” She sought to explain. “I was strange. Even to myself. Suddenly——” She came to the point. “To find oneself free.... Mr. Brumley,—it was wonderful!”
He did not interrupt her and presently she went on again.
“You see,” she said, “I have become a human being——owning myself. I had never thought what this change would be to me.... It has been——. It has been—like being born, when one hadn’t realized before that one wasn’t born.... Now—now I can act. I can do this and that. I used to feel as though I was on strings—with somebody able to pull.... There is no one now able to pull at me, no one able to thwart me....”
Her dark eyes looked among the trees and Mr. Brumley watched her profile.