But she had tried very hard that morning to awaken him to a sense of the kind of thing that was happening to her. She had even, with a sudden sense of panic, suggested leaving the place altogether, hinting that it didn’t suit her. But he had laughed.
She had, in fact, during these last few days, been thinking of Maradick a great deal. For one thing, she hated Mrs. Maradick; she had never in her life before hated anyone so thoroughly. She took people easily as a rule and was charitable in her judgment, but Mrs. Maradick seemed to her to be everything that was bad. The little woman’s assumption of a manner that quite obviously could never belong to her, her complacent patronage of everybody and everything, her appearance, everything seemed to Mrs. Lester the worst possible; she could scarcely bear to stay in the same room with her. She had, therefore, for Maradick a profound pity that had grown as the days advanced. He had seemed to her so patient under what must be a terrible affliction. And so “the game” had grown more serious than usual, serious enough to make her hesitate, and to run, rather as a frightened child runs to its nurse, to Fred for protection. But Fred wouldn’t listen, or, what was worse, listened only to laugh. Well, on Fred’s head be it then!
She had not, however, set out that afternoon with any intention of finding him; she was, indeed, surprised when she saw him there.
They both, at once, felt that there was something between them that had not been there before; they were both nervous, and she did not look at him as she sat down.
“How lazy we are!” she, said. “Why, during the last week we’ve been nothing at all but ‘knitters in the sun!’ I know that’s a nice quotation out of somewhere, but I haven’t the least idea where. But, as a matter of fact, it’s only the irresponsible Tony who’s been rushing about, and he’s made up for most of us.”
She was dressed in her favourite colour, blue, the very lightest and palest of blue. She had a large picture hat tied, in the fashion of a summer of a year or two before, with blue ribbon under her chin; at her belt was a bunch of deep crimson carnations. She took one of them out and twisted it round in her fingers.
She looked up at him and smiled.
“You’re looking very cool and very cross,” she said, “and both are irritating to people on a hot day. Oh! the heat!” She waved her carnation in the air. “You know, if I had my way I should like to be wheeled about in a chair carved out of ice and sprayed by cool negroes with iced rose water! There! Isn’t that Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville and the rest? Oh dear! what rot I’m talking; I’m——”
“I wish,” he said, looking her all over very slowly, “that you’d be yourself, Mrs. Lester, just for a little. I hate all that stuff; you know you’re not a bit like that really. I want you as you are, not a kind of afternoon-tea dummy!”
“But I am like that,” she said, laughing lightly, but also a little nervously. “I’m always like that in hot weather and at Treliss. We’re all like that just now, on the jump. There’s Lady Gale and Sir Richard and Alice Du Cane, and Rupert too, if he wasn’t too selfish, all worrying their eyes out about Tony, and there’s Tony worrying his eyes out about some person or persons unknown, and there’s my husband worrying his eyes out about his next masterpiece, and there’s you worrying your eyes out about——” She paused.