"Away from me?"
"Ah that's impossible." Then she added: "The day's so very nice."
"Lovely weather," Nick dropped. "You want to get away from Mrs. Gresham, I suppose."
She had a pause. "From everything!"
"Well, I want to get away too."
"It has been such a racket. Listen to the dear birds."
"Yes, our noise isn't so good as theirs," said Nick. "I feel as if I had been married and had shoes and rice thrown after me," he went on. "But not to you, Julia—nothing so good as that."
Julia made no reply; she only turned her eyes on the ornamental water stretching away at their right. In a moment she exclaimed, "How nasty the lake looks!" and Nick recognised in her tone a sign of that odd shyness—a perverse stiffness at a moment when she probably but wanted to be soft—which, taken in combination with her other qualities, was so far from being displeasing to him that it represented her nearest approach to extreme charm. He was not shy now, for he considered this morning that he saw things very straight and in a sense altogether superior and delightful. This enabled him to be generously sorry for his companion—if he were the reason of her being in any degree uncomfortable, and yet left him to enjoy some of the motions, not in themselves without grace, by which her discomfort was revealed. He wouldn't insist on anything yet: so he observed that her standard in lakes was too high, and then talked a little about his mother and the girls, their having gone home, his not having seen them that morning, Lady Agnes's deep satisfaction in his victory, and the fact that she would be obliged to "do something" for the autumn—take a house or something or other.
"I'll lend her a house," said Mrs. Dallow.
"Oh Julia, Julia!" Nick half groaned.