“I think London is a little different,” she answered, decisively enough, yet with the effect to his ears of unreserved camaraderie.
They walked slowly down to the end of the street. “Do you mind which way we go?” she asked him, and turned eastward. “I haven’t seen the city in an age,” she remarked, as if the choice needed explanation. Sauntering along, they found little to say to each other at the outset. What words they exchanged were about the mild, sunless sky of the London April, and the wonderful pencilings and rubbings of soot upon the silver-gray of London’s stone walls. Learning that he was a stranger to the Temple, she led the way through the gate and lane, and then, by turnings which it surprised him to find her knowing so well, to the curious little church. The door in the sunken porch was ajar, and they went in. She pointed to the circle of freestone Crusaders looking complacently up from the floor at the Oriental dome which had caught their traveled fancy ages before, and it occurred to her to say: “Is it not interesting to you to think that there were Torrs who were friends and companions of these very Magnavilles and Mareschalls, six hundred years ago?”
He thrust out his lips a little. “I have not much interest in anything concerning the Torrs,” he answered.
She looked up at him with curiosity, but offered no comment. They left the church, and she led him round to the spot where, amid the cracked old flags from forgotten graves, Oliver Goldsmith’s tomb now finds itself. A crumbling wreath of natural flowers showed that some kindly soul had remembered the date of the poet’s death, three weeks before.
Christian displayed scarcely more interest here. “I have not read his ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’” he confessed to her. “I had always the intention to do so, but it—it never came off.”
“That brings me to one thing I wanted to ask you,” she said, as they retraced their steps. “What books have you been reading—since you came to England? I am anxious to know?”
“Not many,” he admitted with an attempted laugh which ended rather shamefacedly. “Reading did not fit itself very readily into my time. At Lord Chobham’s I read in some old books, and at Emanuel’s too, but it was all about our own people—the Barons’ War, and the Wars of the Roses, and the Civil War. I know something about these and about the old families of the West, but not much else. I should have read more, I know, but there was really not much opportunity. But you—I saw at your office what serious books you read. It is what I should like to do, too—sometimes. But there has been no one to talk with about any kind of books.”
They had come out again to the Embankment, and made their pace now even more deliberate. “I have been thinking a great deal about you, and your future, since we met,” she remarked, after a pause. “It has made me wonder what you would do, when the opportunity came to you—and what it would be open for you to do. That is why I began reading the books that I take it you have in mind—but afterward I read them for their own value. At the beginning”—she went on slowly, studying the sky-line in an abstracted way as she walked—“at the beginning I thought I should see you again sometime, and I had the idea that I wanted to be able to advise—or no, not that, but to talk to you, and try to interest you in the right sort of things. But it did not take me long to see how foolish that was.”
“No, no!” urged Christian; without, however, any convincing display of enthusiasm. “There is no one in the world from whom I will so gladly take advice as you.”
She smiled fleetingly at him. “And there is no one in the world,” she replied, “more firmly resolved not to offer you any.”