Here she looked up at him, and suddenly realising that she was not Joyce the schoolmistress, with a little privilege of place, making matters clear, but a young woman discoursing about his own affairs to a young man, stopped suddenly, blushed deeply, and murmured, ‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ with a horror of her own rashness which gave double meaning to all she said.
‘That perhaps I was likely——?’ said Norman. He found her very pleasant company, with her intelligent eager looks, her comprehension of what he meant before it was uttered. ‘Tell me what she would think likely. I know so little about—the lady, as you call her. She was only my step-mother, whom I didn’t much care for when I went away. It is a mistake to judge people before one knows them,’ he added reflectively; but this sentiment, so cognate to her own case, did not in the immediate urgency of the moment arrest Joyce’s attention, especially as he repeated with a smile, ‘what would she think me likely to do?’
‘I was going to speak like an old wife in a cottage—like my dear old granny.’
‘Do so, please,’ he said, with a laugh; and Joyce yielded to the unknown temptation, which had never come in her way before. The gentle malice of society, the undercurrent of meaning, the play with which youths and maidens amuse themselves in the beginning of an intercourse which may come to much more serious results, were quite out of her understanding and experience; but there are some things which are very quickly learnt.
‘She would think—the old wives would say—that now the Captain was come back, he would be bringing home a lady of his own.’
Joyce said this, not with the absolute calm of two minutes ago, but with a smile and blush which altogether changed the significance of the little speech. It had been an almost matter-of-fact explanation—it became now a little winged arrow of provocation, a sort of challenge. Captain Bellendean laughed.
‘I see,’ he said; ‘and you think that is a course open to me? But a lady of my own might not be so good as the lady—and then there are difficulties about time, for instance. I might not be able to bring her at once; and the one I wanted might not have me: and—— Miss Joyce, your attention flags—you are not interested in me.’
‘I was thinking,’ said Joyce, ‘that though you laugh, it would be no laughing for her to leave Bellendean.’
The Captain perceived that the joke was to go no further. ‘I do not believe it is her doing at all—it is my father’s doing. He prefers London—Half Moon Street, and rooms where you can scarcely turn round.’
‘Half Moon Street!’