“Why? 'Cos it isn't unpleasant enough?”
“No,” answered Joan, after a pause, in the deepest earnestness—“no—that's just it.”
Out of which ambiguous observation the major seemed to gather some meaning, for he looked up at the moon with one of his most vacant smiles.
CHAPTER XXIX. A LESSON.
“Whom the gods mean to destroy, they blind.”
Mrs. Vansittart had passed the age of blind love. She had not the incentive of a healthy competition. She had not that more dangerous incentive of middle-aged vanity, which draws the finger of derision so often in the direction of widows. And yet she took a certain pleasure in playing a half-careless and wholly cynical Juliet to Percy Roden's gauche Romeo. She had no intention of marrying him, and yet she continued to encourage him even now that open war was declared between Cornish and the malgamite makers. Cornish had indeed thanked Mrs. Vansittart for her assistance in the past in such a manner as to convey to her that she could hardly be of use to him in the future. He had magnified her good offices, and had warned her to beware of arousing Von Holzen's anger. Indeed, her use of Percy Roden was at an end, and yet she would not let him go. Cornish was puzzled, and so was Dorothy. Percy Roden was gratified, and read the riddle by the light of his own vanity. Mrs. Vansittart was not, perhaps, the first woman to puzzle her neighbours by refusing to relinquish that which she did not want. She was not the first, perhaps, to nurse a subtle desire to play some part in the world rather than be left idle in the wings. So she played the part that came first and easiest to her hand—a woman's natural part, of stirring up strife between men.
She was, therefore, gratified when Von Holzen made his way slowly towards her through the crowd on the Kursaal terrace one afternoon on the occasion of a Thursday concert. She was sitting alone in a far corner of the terrace, protected by a glass screen from the wind which ever blows at Scheveningen. She never mingled with the summer visitors at this popular Dutch resort—indeed, knew none of them. Von Holzen seemed to be similarly situated; but Mrs. Vansittart knew that he did not seek her out on that account. He was not a man to do anything—much less be sociable—out of idleness. He only dealt with his fellow-beings when he had a use for them.
She returned his grave bow with an almost imperceptible movement of the head, and for a moment they looked hard at each other.