"I have your promise," he said, "I can come and see you?" He looked thwarted and miserable.
"If you happen to be in town," she said.
"But I mean to live there," he said. This insinuation on her part, that she had not accepted the fact that he was going to live in town, was unsympathetic of her. "I can't stand the loneliness of Chartcote, it has become intolerable."
The word "loneliness" melted May. She knew what loneliness meant. After all, how could he help being the man he was? Was it his fault that he had been born with his share of the Boreham heredity? Was he able to control his irritability, to suppress his exaggerated self-esteem; both of them, perhaps, symptoms of some obscure form of neurosis?
May felt a pang of pity for him. His face showed signs of pain and discontent and restlessness.
"I shall leave Chartcote any day, immediately. London draws me back to it. I can think there. I can't at Chartcote, the atmosphere is sodden at Chartcote, my neighbours are clods."
May looked at him anxiously. "It is dull for you," she said.
Encouraged by this he went on rapidly. "Art, literature is nothing to them. They are centaurs. They ought to eat grass. They don't know a sunset from a swede. They don't know the name of a bird, except game birds; they are ignorant fools, they are damned——" Boreham's breathing was loud and rapid.
"And yet you hate Oxford," murmured May, as she held out her hand. She still did not mean Boreham to come inside the Court, her hand was a dismissal.
"Because Oxford is so smug," said Boreham. "And the country is smug. England is the land that begets effeteness and smuggishness. Yes, I should be pretty desperate," he added, and he held her hand with some pressure—"I should be pretty desperate, only you have promised to let me come and see you."