She pointed a finger dramatically down at him. “That pledge,” she said, “is going to be redeemed. See if it isn’t!”
“I always thought,” he mocked, “that a man and a woman didn’t meet in a lonely place for nothing.”
And then she thought to ask him how he came to be there anyway, in that little lane. He told her of his house by the bridge, and of the Misses Cloister-Smiths, remembering how in the old days Virginia had been amused by the oddities of names. And as she listened, her first gaiety at seeing him seemed somehow to leave her, she grew very quiet and silent, as though a cloud from the bleak sky had sombrely caressed her; and her eyes, so clear and merry but a moment before, wandered about the bleak countryside, beyond his shoulder. Virginia’s eyes were like sentinels, put there to beguile you while Virginia was far away, in some curious unknown place. Only once she swayed to a sudden step of her horse: she was quite immobile, a little sad. He watched her.
Then she told him what he had already guessed, that she and her husband were staying with Rupert Kare for a week or so. No one in the place, she remarked, had said a word about his living round above.
“I doubt if they know,” Ivor said. “I’m living a frightfully private life.”
“So you never go up there, then?” she wondered curiously. “Though I seem to remember your knowing Rupert quite well once upon a time.”
“Oh, yes!” But he might just as well have said, “Oh, no!” for all the real answer he gave. But he knew that Virginia was peculiarly able to understand people’s dislikes and distempers, and that she allowed for them; it used commonly to be her own feeling about a good many people. Yes, she understood.
“But it isn’t so easy for me—to outlaw myself like that,” she told him gravely. “For there I am, you see, still in it. Same men, same women, same places, same baubles. And only dress and dancing changes.... And so I insisted on escaping this afternoon for an hour or so.”
“You are very wise, Ivor,” she suddenly said, “to have left all that as suddenly as you did, so long ago. You annoyed us, but then you wanted to annoy us, and you were wise. And do you know, I’ve always said that you are very wise. Whenever your name is mentioned, whether it’s about a book or a woman, I always say I knew you once and that you are very wise. He knew us all once, I add, but now he is very wise and exclusive. He is indiscriminately exclusive, I say....”
“It’s only that I’m trying to work,” he earnestly explained, looking up at her. And she stared down at him, and under the shadow of her hat her mouth seemed twisted into a queer little smile which puzzled him.