"She is very pretty, isn't she?"
"Very—like a Verrocchio angel—who has been to college! She is an artist?"
"She paints. She admires Delorme."
"That one can see. And he admires her!"
"We—my mother—wants him to paint her."
"He will—if he knows his own business."
"A Miss Penfold?" said Lady Barbara, putting up her eyeglass. "You say she paints. The modern girl must always do something! My girls have been brought up for home."
A remark that drove Tatham into a rash defence of the modern girl to which he was quite unequal, and in which indeed he was half-hearted, for his fundamental ideas were quite as old-fashioned as Lady Barbara's. But Lydia, for him, was of no date; only charm itself, one with all the magic and grace that had ever been in the world, or would be.
Suddenly he saw that she was looking at him—a bright, signalling look, only to tell him how hugely well she was getting on with Delorme. He smiled in return, but inwardly he was discontented. Always this gay camaraderie—like a boy's. Not the slightest tremor in it. Not a touch of consciousness—or of sex. He could not indeed have put it so. All he knew was that he was always thirstily seeking something she showed no signs of giving him.
But he himself was being rapidly swept off his feet. Since their meeting at Threlfall, which had been interrupted by Melrose's freakish return, there had been other meetings, as delightful as before, yet no more conclusive or encouraging. He and Lydia had indeed grown intimate. He had revealed to her thoughts and feelings which he had unveiled for no one else—not even for Victoria—since he was a boy at school with boyish friendships. And she had handled them with such delicacy, such sweetness; such frankness too, in return as to her own "ideas," those stubborn intractable ideas, which made him frown to think of. Yet all the time—he knew it—there had been no flirting on her part. Never had she given him the smallest ground to think her in love with him. On the contrary, she had maintained between them for all her gentleness, from beginning to end, that soft, intangible barrier which at once checked and challenged him.