He sat there face to face with her and for some time said nothing. He had a mixture of feelings, and the memory of other places, other hours, was stealing over him. There had been of old a very considerable absence of interposing surfaces between these two—he had known her as one knew people only amid the civilisation of big tornadoes and back piazzas. He had liked her extremely in a place where it would have been ridiculous to be difficult to please. But his sense of this fact was somehow connected with other and such now alien facts; his liking for Nancy Beck was an emotion of which the sole setting was a back piazza. She presented herself here on a new basis—she appeared to want to be classified afresh. Littlemore said to himself that this was too much trouble; he had taken her at the great time in that way—he couldn’t begin at this late hour to take her in another way. He asked himself if she were going to be a real bore. It wasn’t easy to suppose her bent on ravage, but she might become tiresome if she were too disposed to be different. It made him rather afraid when she began to talk about European society, about his sister, to pronounce things vulgar. Littlemore was naturally merciful and decently just; but there was in his composition an element of the indolent, the sceptical, perhaps even the brutal, which made him decidedly prefer the simplicity of their former terms of intercourse. He had no particular need to see a woman rise again, as the mystic process was called; he didn’t believe in women’s rising again. He believed in their not going down, thought it perfectly possible and eminently desirable; but held it was much better for society that the divisions, the categories, the differing values, should be kept clear. He didn’t believe in bridging the chasms, in muddling the kinds. In general he didn’t pretend to say what was good for society—society seemed to him rather in a bad way; but he had a conviction on this particular point. Nancy Beck going in for the great prizes, that spectacle might be entertaining for a simple spectator; but it would be a nuisance, an embarrassment, from the moment anything more than detached “fun” should represent his share. He had no wish to be “mean,” but it might be well to show her he wasn’t to be humbugged.
“Oh if there’s anything you want you’ll have it,” he said in answer to her last remark. “You’ve always had what you want.”
“Well, I want something new this time. Does your sister reside in London?”
“My dear lady, what do you know about my sister?” Littlemore asked. “She’s not a woman you’d care in the least for.”
His old friend had a marked pause. “You don’t really respect me!” she then abruptly and rather gaily cried. It had one of her “Texan” effects of drollery; so that, yes, evidently, if he wished to preserve the simplicity of their former intercourse she was willing to humour him.
“Ah, my dear Mrs. Beck—!” he vaguely protested, using her former name quite by accident. At San Pablo he—and apparently she—had never thought whether he respected her or not. That never came up.
“That’s a proof of it—calling me by that hateful name! Don’t you believe I’m married? I haven’t been fortunate in my names,” she pensively added.
“You make it very awkward when you say such mad things. My sister lives most of the year in the country; she’s very simple, rather dull, perhaps a trifle narrow-minded. You’re very clever, very lively, and as large and loose and free as all creation. That’s why I think you wouldn’t like her.”
“You ought to be ashamed to run down your sister!” Mrs. Headway made prompt answer. “You told me once—at San Pablo—that she was the nicest woman you knew. I made a note of that, you see. And you told me she was just my age. So that makes it rather inglorious for you if you won’t introduce me!” With which she gave a laugh that perhaps a little heralded danger. “I’m not in the least afraid of her being dull. It’s all right, it’s just refined and nice, to be dull. I’m ever so much too exciting.”
“You are indeed, ever so much! But nothing is more easy than to know my sister,” said Littlemore, who knew perfectly that what he said was untrue. And then as a diversion from this delicate topic he brought out: “Are you going to marry Sir Arthur?”