He thought he detected the suggestion of some reservation in her answer, and said, "Only lately? Do you mean that this is a new freedom for you?"
She manifestly hesitated before she replied to that, and her "Oh, no! not new exactly," still left him in doubt as to what was in her mind.
They had left the main road now, and were walking in an olive-green twilight along a deep, narrow lane, its banks lush with fern luxuriating in the warm shade afforded by high banks, topped by hornbeam and hazel hedges that nearly met overhead.
Arthur lifted his hat, and wiped his forehead. "It's exactly like being in a hothouse down here," he said. "Rather ripping though."
"We shall come out on to the common a few yards farther on," Eleanor replied. "It's almost too hot to talk here, isn't it?"
He conceded that, but when they had walked on in silence for fifty yards or so she suddenly said, "I know I'm not being honest with you, but I will be presently, even if it does mean talking about things I would so much sooner forget. Forgetting isn't being honest, even with oneself. Only not till we're right out in the open if you don't mind."
"Of course I don't mind," Arthur responded warmly. "And I'd like you to do exactly what you want to about—being honest. If you'd sooner not talk about the other affair, we won't."
She nodded her agreement, but he was uncertain whether or not she meant to revert to Hartling as a topic of conversation when they were "in the open." And, when presently they came out on to the common, it seemed that she was still skirting that topic, for she began to talk about the war.
"I was only fifteen when it began," she said, in answer to some comment of Arthur's. "And I really didn't understand all that it meant until it was nearly over. My grandfather used to keep the papers away from me, and told my governess—Elizabeth and I shared a governess then—not to tell us about it. But we all shirked it; tried to pretend that we couldn't do anything. And in a way it never touched us. Hubert would have gone if my grandfather had let him, and at that time I thought Hubert was being silly about it." She paused and drew in her breath with an effect of lamenting her own blindness.
"But you couldn't have helped if you'd known, you, personally, I mean," Arthur said.