“Yes, yes—he knows that.”
Paul Overt stared. “That they seem to me of a queerness—!”
“Well yes, or at any rate that they’re not what they should be. He told me he didn’t esteem them. He has told me such wonderful things—he’s so interesting.”
There was a certain shock for Paul Overt in the knowledge that the fine genius they were talking of had been reduced to so explicit a confession and had made it, in his misery, to the first comer; for though Miss Fancourt was charming what was she after all but an immature girl encountered at a country-house? Yet precisely this was part of the sentiment he himself had just expressed: he would make way completely for the poor peccable great man not because he didn’t read him clear, but altogether because he did. His consideration was half composed of tenderness for superficialities which he was sure their perpetrator judged privately, judged more ferociously than any one, and which represented some tragic intellectual secret. He would have his reasons for his psychology à fleur de peau, and these reasons could only be cruel ones, such as would make him dearer to those who already were fond of him. “You excite my envy. I have my reserves, I discriminate—but I love him,” Paul said in a moment. “And seeing him for the first time this way is a great event for me.”
“How momentous—how magnificent!” cried the girl. “How delicious to bring you together!”
“Your doing it—that makes it perfect,” our friend returned.
“He’s as eager as you,” she went on. “But it’s so odd you shouldn’t have met.”
“It’s not really so odd as it strikes you. I’ve been out of England so much—made repeated absences all these last years.”
She took this in with interest. “And yet you write of it as well as if you were always here.”
“It’s just the being away perhaps. At any rate the best bits, I suspect, are those that were done in dreary places abroad.”