"It should have taught you to feel for me, but you are not 'wondrous kind.'"
"Oh, I am more to be pitied than you are! What have I got in my life? Friends? Yes—to play bridge with. My husband? He delivers speeches on local option, and climbs mountains. Both make me deadly tired. I used to go in for music—'God save the King' is the only tune he knows when he hears it, and he only knows that because the men take their hats off. I was interested in my house at the beginning—after you've quarrelled in your house every day for years it doesn't absorb you to make the mantelpiece look pretty. I wanted a child—well, my sister has seven! ... Voilà my autobiography up to date."
"There is to-morrow," said Conrad, moved.
"To-morrow you must give me the comedy," she smiled; "and the morning after, I go to the Highlands—and big men will shoot little birds, and think it's 'sport.' Did you ever see a sparrow die? I watched one once. It was human. Like a child! ... Come on, come on, let's go out!"
And behold another woman! She had been wise, and dejected him; now she was unwise, to make amends. Behold a myriad women in one. Before half an hour had passed she had told him her philosophy was a puff ball, that she had prated reason only to be reasoned with. And she told him so without a word about it—said so by the modulation of her voice while they talked trifles.
And Conrad? Conrad had been scrambling to the point of friendship, and he slipped back to folly. Conrad strove to forget that discomfiting phrase, "You are in love with a memory, not with me." It made the folly so difficult.
He could not succeed in forgetting it. It was in his mind next day, coldly a fact. Yes, he was making love to Mrs. Adaile because she was Mrs. Adaile, not because she was a charming woman. He knew that if they hadn't met before he came to Ostend, he might have admired her, tried to know her, grown to like her, but that he would never have said to her what he had said. Nor wished to say it.
Yet there was the regnant truth that it was she. She had the fascination of sharing with him his dearest, his sweetest remembrances; the radiance of the past still tinged her—in her keeping lay the wonder of his youth.
So they ate Neapolitan ices in the morning, and she brought down the doyley in the afternoon, and they listened to Chopin again in the evening.
It was the last evening. The Bletchworths and she were leaving early on the morrow, and he was unlikely to be alone with her again before she went.