“Absolutely,” I said in a perfectly conventional tone, I was now on my mettle that she should not discover what there was humanly common in my nature. She took my answer at her own valuation and was satisfied.
“They can’t fail to understand each other on the very highest level of idealistic perceptions. Can you imagine my John thrown away on some enamoured white goose out of a stuffy old salon? Why, she couldn’t even begin to understand what he feels or what he needs.”
“Yes,” I said impenetrably, “he is not easy to understand.”
“I have reason to think,” she said with a suppressed smile, “that he has a certain power over women. Of course I don’t know anything about his intimate life but a whisper or two have reached me, like that, floating in the air, and I could hardly suppose that he would find an exceptional resistance in that quarter of all others. But I should like to know the exact degree.”
I disregarded an annoying tendency to feel dizzy that came over me and was very careful in managing my voice.
“May I ask, Madame, why you are telling me all this?”
“For two reasons,” she condescended graciously. “First of all because Mr. Mills told me that you were much more mature than one would expect. In fact you look much younger than I was prepared for.”
“Madame,” I interrupted her, “I may have a certain capacity for action and for responsibility, but as to the regions into which this very unexpected conversation has taken me I am a great novice. They are outside my interest. I have had no experience.”
“Don’t make yourself out so hopeless,” she said in a spoilt-beauty tone. “You have your intuitions. At any rate you have a pair of eyes. You are everlastingly over there, so I understand. Surely you have seen how far they are . . .”
I interrupted again and this time bitterly, but always in a tone of polite enquiry: