“I will drive,” she said, and there was a dull, tired tone in her voice.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Gwen was in an unusual humour this afternoon. She was silent until they got into the fiacre, but directly it moved she began to talk in a swift even way peculiarly her own.
Everything she said had the calm cold brilliancy of steel about it, and she advanced the most dangerously heterodox opinions in a most unimpassioned and frozen style.
Strange shrugged his shoulders with grim good humour as she went on. He admired her splendid insolence, as any man would have done; all the same, he felt a half frantic longing for that picture-bride and an ever-increasing wonder as to how any woman cast in the same mould, eye for eye, mouth for mouth, dimple for dimple, curve for curve, could so atrociously belie her nature.
Suddenly Gwen veered round and turned the conversation into a personal and analytical channel. She had never done it before, except in her one brief allusion to the yellow aster.
“That boy of yours is a genius, Humphrey, your swan is no goose,” said she, “but, tell me, did I look in the very least like that woman, the day you married me?”
He looked at her face of fine scorn.
“Not in the least, except in the matter of form, and colour, and pose. These are you in tangible flesh and blood.”
“What did you mean by your ‘prophetic’?” she demanded, casting pink shadows over her face as she moved the red silk blind slowly to and fro.