'Superb!' he said, but half-mechanically. 'I had no notion a winter's work would have done so much for you. Was Berlin as stimulating as you expected? When I heard you had gone, I said to myself—"Well, at least, now, there is one completely happy person in Europe!"'
'Did you? How easily we all dogmatise about each other?' she said scornfully. Her manner was by no means simple. He did not feel himself at all at ease with her. His very embarrassment, however, drove him into rashness, as often happens.
'I thought I had enough to go upon!' he said in another tone; and his black eyes, sparkling as though a film had dropped from them, supplied the reference his words forbore.
She turned away from him with a perceptible drawing up of the whole figure.
'Will you come and be introduced?' she asked him coldly. He bowed as coldly and followed her. Wholesome resentment of her manner was denied him. He had asked for her friendship, and had then gone away and forgotten her. Clearly what she meant him to see now was that they were strangers again. Well, she was amply in her right. He suspected that his allusion to their first talk over the fire had not been unwelcome to her, as an opportunity.
And he had actually debated whether he should come, lest in spite of himself she might beguile him once more into those old lapses of will and common sense! Coxcomb!
He made a few spasmodic efforts at conversation with the lady to whom she had introduced him, then awkwardly disengaged himself and went to stand in a corner and study his neighbours.
Close to him, he found, was the poet of the party, got up in the most correct professional costume—long hair, velvet coat, eyeglass and all. His extravagance, however, was of the most conventional type. Only his vanity had a touch of the sublime. Langham, who possessed a sort of fine-ear gift for catching conversation, heard him saying to an open-eyed ingénue beside him,—
'Oh, my literary baggage is small as yet. I have only done, perhaps, three things that will live.'
'Oh, Mr. Wood!' said the maiden, mildly protesting against so much modesty.