“Then Miss Ransome is not your attraction at Enderby? It is Mrs. Greswold who draws you.”
“Why should I be drawn?” he asked, with his languid air. “I go there in sheer idleness. They like me to make music for them; they fool me and praise me; and it is pleasant to be fooled by two pretty women.”
“Does Mrs. Greswold take any part in the fooling? She looks like marble.”
“There is fire under that marble. Mrs. Greswold is romantically in love with her husband: but that is a complaint which is not incurable.”
“He is not an agreeable man,” said Louise, remembering how long George Greswold and his wife had kept aloof from her. “And he does not look a happy man.”
“He is not happy.”
“You know something about him—more than we all know?” asked Louise, with keen curiosity.
“Not much. I met him at Nice before he came into his property. He was not a very fortunate person at that time, and he doesn’t care to be reminded of it now.”
“Was he out-at-elbows, or in debt?”
“Neither. His troubles did not take that form. But I am not a gossip. Let the past be past, as Gœthe says. We can’t change it, and it is charity to forget it. If we are not sure about what we touch and hear and see—or fancy we hear and touch and see—in the present, how much less can we be sure of any reality or external existence in the past! It is all done away with—vanished. How can we know that it ever was? A grave here and there is the only witness; and even the grave and the name on the headstone may be only a projection of our own consciousness. We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”