"As far as that goes, it's the one place where we may be seen together with impunity," he laughed with boyish glee, "for only the most cussed imagination would surmise that we had selected this house for a secret rendezvous. But we'll move on, if you wish."
He offered her his arm, which she refused.
Then they walked together through crooked dark back streets towards the west-end. He went on talking steadily. One thought seemed to lead to another. Sometimes it seemed to Lilly as if he had forgotten her altogether in letting off his fireworks of speech. He revelled in the play of his own wit. For a long time his conversation seemed to have no connection with her and her pitiful existence. But she was mistaken; his gold was coined for her, and he expended it so lavishly that her brain had not room enough to assimilate it all.
He walked beside her with an elastic, somewhat jumpy step. His cane, the knob of which he held in his pocket, flicked his shoulder. His white silk muffler gleamed, and that was all she could see of him. He talked on and on. How he talked! Often she felt as if she were being slapped, oftener as if she were caressed. When Richard and his friends were the target of his jeers, she would gladly have contradicted him; but he mentioned no names, and, after all, she had often thought the same.
Tentatively he played on her aristocratic antecedents. He depicted scenes from country life, and said there was no pleasure to equal rides à deux in the rosy freshness of early morning. It seemed as if he had been present at everything she had ever done.
"I have lived a great deal in castles," he said, in explanation. "I know the life well."
Her past, too, it would seem. So he went on searching into her soul. When he began to speak of the books which he had lent her, without commenting on her refusal to see him the morning he called, she made a mild protest.
"Pray never lend me any more of the same kind!" she implored.
"Why not?"
"They puzzle me and make me ill.... I don't know how to describe it. You said they would help me to find myself ... but, on the contrary, they seem to estrange me from everything that I had always thought before was pure and holy."