He hesitated, trying, even at the moment that an impulse of jealous alarm which astonished himself had taken possession of him, to find the moderate and measured phrase.
"I have known him from a boy," he said. "He is a connection of the Levens, and used to be always there in old days. He is very brilliant and very gifted—"
"Your 'but' must be very bad," she threw in, "it is so long in coming."
"Then I will say, whatever opening it gives you," he replied with spirit, "that I admire him without respecting him."
"Who ever thought otherwise of a clever opponent?" she cried. "It is the stock formula."
The remark stung, all the more because Aldous was perfectly conscious that there was much truth in her implied charge of prejudice. He had never been very capable of seeing this particular man in the dry light of reason, and was certainly less so than before, since it had been revealed to him that Wharton and Mr. Boyce's daughter were to be brought, before long, into close neighbourhood.
"I am sorry that I seem to you such a Pharisee," he said, turning upon her a look which had both pain and excitement in it.
She was silent, and they walked on a few yards without speaking. The wood had thickened around them: The high road was no longer visible. No sound of wheels or footsteps reached them. The sun struck freely through the beech-trees, already half bared, whitening the grey trunks at intervals to an arrowy distinctness and majesty, or kindling the slopes of red and freshly fallen leaves below into great patches of light and flame. Through the stems, as always, the girdling blues of the plain, and in their faces a gay and buoyant breeze, speaking rather of spring than autumn. Robins, "yellow autumn's nightingales," sang in the hedge to their right. In the pause between them, sun, wind, birds made their charm felt. Nature, perpetual chorus as she is to man, stole in, urging, wooing, defining. Aldous's heart leapt to the spur of a sudden resolve.
Instinctively she turned to him at the same moment as he to her, and seeing his look she paled a little.
"Do you guess at all why it hurts me to jar with you?" he said—finding his words in a rush, he did not know how—"Why every syllable of yours matters to me? It is because I have hopes—dreams—which have become my life! If you could accept this—this—feeling—this devotion—which has grown up in me—if you could trust yourself to me—you should have no cause, I think—ever—to think me hard or narrow towards any person, any enthusiasm for which you had sympathy. May I say to you all that is in my mind—or—or—am I presuming?"