"Perhaps, very often I haven't known what to think."
She started—reddened ever so little. "Does that mean"—she hesitated for a phrase—"that you have moved at all on the main question?"
"No," he said deliberately—"no! I think as I always did, that you are calling in law to do what law can't do. But perhaps I appreciate better than I once did what provokes you to it. It seems to me difficult now to meet the case your side is putting forward by a mere non possumus. One wants to stop the machine a bit and think it out. So much I admit."
She met his smile with a curious, tremulous look. Instinctively he guessed that this partial triumph in him of her cause—of Maxwell's cause—had let flow some inner font of feeling.
"If you only knew," she said, "how all this Parliamentary rush and clatter seem to me beside the mark. People talk to me of divisions and votes. I think all the time of persons I know—of faces of children—sick-beds, horrible rooms—"
She had turned her face from the crowd towards the open window, in whose recess they were standing. As she spoke they both fell back a little into comparative solitude, and he drew her on to talk—trying in a young eager way to make her rest in his kindness, to soothe her weariness and disappointment. And as she spoke, he clutched at the minutes; he threw more and more sympathy at her feet to keep her talking, to enchain her there beside him, in her lovely whiteness and grace. And, mingled with it all, was the happy guess that she liked to linger with him—that amid all this hard clamour of public talk and judgment she felt him a friend in a peculiar sense—a friend whose loyalty grew with misfortune. As for this wild-beast world, that was thwarting and libelling her, he began to think of it with a blind, up-swelling rage—a desire to fight and win for her—to put down—
"Tressady, your wife sent me to find you. She wishes to go home."
The voice was Harding Watton's. That observant young man advanced bowing, and holding out his hand to Lady Maxwell.
When Marcella had drifted once more into the fast-melting crowd, George found himself face to face with Letty. She was very white, and stared at him with wide, passionate eyes.
And on the way home George, with all his efforts, could not keep the peace. Letty flung at him a number of bitter and insulting things that he found very hard to bear.