She hesitated and, for the first time since he had been in the room, ceased for an instant to look straight at him. She only answered, still laughing however: "Poor dears—they were altogether too deep!"
She evidently wished to convey that she had never known. Maurice was a little disappointed: at present he would have preferred her knowledge. But as he walked home across the park, through Kensington Gardens, he felt it impossible to believe in her ignorance.
V
At the end of a month he broke out to her. "I can't get over it, it's so extraordinary—the difference between your youth and your maturity!"
"Did you expect me to be an eternal child?" Mrs. Tregent asked composedly.
"No, it isn't that." He stopped—it would be difficult to explain.
"What is it then?" she inquired, with her systematic refusal to acknowledge a complication. There was always, to Maurice Glanvil's ear, in her impenetrability to allusion, the faintest, softest glee, and it gave her on this occasion the appearance of recognising his difficulty and being amused at it. She would be excusable to be a little cold-blooded. He really knew however that the penalty was all in his own reflections, for it had not taken him even a month to perceive that she was supremely, almost strangely indulgent. There was nothing he was ready to say that she might not hear, and her absence of coquetry was a remarkable rest to him.
"It isn't what I expected—it's what I didn't expect. To say exactly what I mean, it's the way you've improved."
"I've improved? I'm so glad!"
"Surely you've been aware of it—you've been conscious of the transformation."