She came towards him, smiling, laughing, suddenly springing up before him, her arms outstretched, bright in her orange jumper as she had been on that day in Henry's room; then her face changed, softened, gravity came into it; she was leaning towards him, listening to his story, her eyes were kindly, she stretched out her hand and touched his knee, he held out his arms. . . . Oh God! but he must not. She was not for him, she could not be. Even were he not already tied what could he offer her with his solemnity and dreaminess? . . . He sprang up.
"Going already?" said Campbell. "Had enough of it?"
"No. I want to speak to Monteith. Hullo, there's Seymour. Keep him off, Campbell. His self-satisfaction is more than I could endure just now."
He sat down again and watched the figures, so curiously dim and unreal that it might be a world of ghosts.
"Ghosts? Perhaps we are. Anyway we soon will be."
Jane Ross came stumping towards him. "Oh, Mr. Westcott! Come and make yourself useful. There's Anna Makepeace over there, who wrote Plum Bun. You ought to know her."
"I'm very happy where I am." She stumped away, and, sitting back in his chair, he was suddenly aware of Grace Talbot, who, although Monteith had come up and was talking very seriously, was staring in front of her, lost, many miles away, dreaming.
She was suddenly human to him, she who had been for the most part the drop of ink at the end of a cynical pen, the contemptuous flash of an arrogant eye, the languorous irony of a dismissing hand.
She was as unhappy as himself; perceiving it suddenly and her essential loneliness he felt a warmth of feeling for her that intensely surprised him. "What children we all are!" he said to himself: "the Graces, Monteith, the great Mr. Winch, the Parisian Mrs. Wanda, and all the rest of us! How little we know! What insecure, fumbling artists the best of us—and the only two great writers of our time are the humblest men amongst us. After all our arrogance is necessary for us because we have failed, written so badly, travelled such a tiny way."
An urgent longing for humility, generosity, humour, kindliness of heart swept over him. He felt that at that moment he could love any one, however slow and conventional their brain were their heart honest, generous and large. He and Monteith and Grace Talbot were leading little hemmed-in lives, moving in little hemmed-in groups, talking in little hemmed-in phrases.