"Have no fear," he added. "It shall remain safely stowed away. It is not, I admit, exactly designed for what you call family reading—unsuited, for example, to the ingenuous minds of those excellent young tennis players! Ah, the energy they display! It puts me to shame."
Joanna came forward slowly, touching chairs, flower-stands, tables, in passing, as though blindly feeling her way.
"I have wanted so much to speak to you alone," she said.
"Yes—yes?" Adrian answered inquiringly, with a hasty mental looking around for suitable barricade-building material.
"Ever since you told me you had lately suffered anxiety and trouble," she continued.
"Ah! my dear cousin, you are too sympathetic, too kind. Who among us is free from anxieties and troubles—des ennuis? One accepts them as an integral part of one's existence upon this astonishing planet. One even cherishes a certain affection for them, perhaps one's own dear little personal ennuis."
Joanna sank into a chair. Her lips worked with emotion.
"I wish I could feel as you do," she said. "But I am weak. I rebel against that which pains me or causes me anxiety. I have no large tolerance of philosophy. But, therefore, all the more do I admire it in you. Now, when I allude to your trouble you try to put the matter aside gracefully out of consideration for me. Indeed, I appreciate that consideration, but while it causes me gratitude, it increases my regret.—You will not think me officious or intrusive? But I cannot tell you how it distresses me that you should endure any mental suffering, that you should have troubles or anxieties. I had never thought of the possibility of anything unhappy in your life or circumstances. Since you told me I think of it continually. Forgive me if I appear presumptuous, but you have done so incalculably much for—for us—Margaret, I mean, and me—especially, I know"—her voice faded to a mere thread—"I know, of course, for me—that I have wondered whether there was not anything in which I could be of some slight use to you, in which I could help you, in return?"
Adrian had subsided into his long chair again. He leaned sideways, his legs crossed, his right arm extended to its full length across the arm of the chair, holding his cigarette between his first and second fingers, as far from his companion as possible lest the smoke of it should be unpleasant to her. His lean, shapely hand and wrist showed brown against the hard white of his shirt-cuff, and the blue smoke from the smoldering cigarette curled delicately upward in the hot, fragrant air. And Joanna watched his every movement; watched with the fixed intentness, the beatified idiocy, of those who dote.
Outwardly the young man remained charmingly debonair. Inwardly he labored at the erection of barricades and the strengthening of earthworks with positive frenzy, distractedly apprehensive of what might be coming next.