"You admit the strength of the temptation? It is very simple, no one could help making it. To be spectator of the height of anything—the best, the climax—makes any mortal's pulses run. Beauty, success, happiness, for instance?"
He paused smiling. She leant a thin hand on the mantelpiece and looked away; Aldous's pearls slipped backwards along her white arm.
"Do you suppose to-night will be the height of happiness?" she said at last with a little scorn. "These functions don't present themselves to me in such a light."
Wharton could have laughed out—her pedantry was so young and unconscious. But he restrained himself.
"I shall be with the majority to-night," he said demurely. "I may as well warn you."
Her colour rose. No other man had ever dared to speak to her with this assurance, this cool scrutinising air. She told herself to be indignant; the next moment she was indignant, but with herself for remembering conventionalities.
"Tell me one thing," said Wharton, changing his tone wholly. "I know you went down hurriedly to the village before dinner. Was anything wrong?"
"Old Patton is very ill," she said, sighing. "I went to ask after him; he may die any moment. And the Hurds' boy too."
He leant against the mantelpiece, talking to her about both cases with a quick incisive common-sense—not unkind, but without a touch of unnecessary sentiment, still less of the superior person—which represented one of the moods she liked best in him. In speaking of the poor he always took the tone of comradeship, of a plain equality, and the tone was, in fact, genuine.
"Do you know," he said presently, "I did not tell you before, but I am certain that Hurd's wife is afraid of you, that she has a secret from you?"