Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical assent as she nodded.
“But do you like this Russian plan any better?” demanded Celia. “I wish for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me—and let me know to the uttermost just what you think.” “'For once'?” queried the other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of the quotation to be marked.
“Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking,” Miss Madden declared. She put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. “It is not you alone—Edith. Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your country-women. You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things back. I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready to believe, would be incapable of telling an untruth. But I've never met one of whom I could be sure that she would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see this case in point,” she pursued, with a little laugh, “I could not drag it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea, so long as there was a chance of our going. Immediately we find that we can't go, you admit that you hated it.”
“But you wanted to go,” objected Lady Cressage, quietly. “That was the important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with the matter.”
Celia's face clouded momentarily. “Those are not the kind of things I like to hear you say,” she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. “They put everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said it a thousand times—and have I ever done anything to disprove it? But I never can find out what you do want—what really will please you! You never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank about the things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of my eye that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking or not.”
The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. “That is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago,” said Lady Cressage, passively—“that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak. I thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the responsibility of defending it is not mine.”
“Delightful!” cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again. “You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with. The mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford—or passing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing—if I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and have to watch you for weeks to make out what it was—and it would all be too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You don't tell me things!”
Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve. “It is a constitutional defect—even national, according to you. How shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to tell you?—I forget.”
“The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our passports, and then to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well worth while—and next Moscow—and so on to St. Petersburg, in time to see the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see the characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. With the furs and the sledges, and the three horses galloping over the snow—it seems to me it must be the best thing in Europe—if you can call Russia Europe. That's the way it presents itself to me—but then I was brought up in a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort of thing—in its proper season. It is different with you. In England you don't know what a real winter is. And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would like the Russian experiment.”
The other laughed gently. “But if I don't know what a real winter is, how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes—truly—I should like very much to go.”