It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for so many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant usually that there was some complaint to be made against the servants, more often than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd, inexplicable intensity.
Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat there, waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on which he had been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange, unaccustomed desire to be disagreeable, to create in some way an excitement that would shatter for a moment the overwhelming sense of monotony and so relieve her nerves. She thought, “What has come over me? Am I one of those women who enjoys working up scenes?”
He rose from his chair and stood, very tall and thin, with drooping shoulders, looking down at her out of the pale eyes. “It’s about Sybil,” he said. “I understand that she goes riding every morning with this fellow O’Hara.”
“That’s true,” replied Olivia quietly. “They go every morning before breakfast, before the rest of us are out.”
He frowned and assumed almost mechanically a manner of severe dignity. “And you mean to say that you have known about it all along?”
“They meet down in the meadows by the old gravel-pit because he doesn’t care to come up to the house.”
“He knows, perhaps, that he wouldn’t be welcome.”
Olivia smiled a little ironically. “I’m sure that’s the reason. That’s why he didn’t come to-night, though I asked him. You must know, Anson, that I don’t feel as you do about him.”
“No, I suppose not. You rarely do.”
“There’s no need to be unpleasant,” she said quietly.