"It was poetry, then?" said Bice. "I know very little of that. It is not in Tauchnitz, perhaps? All I know of English is from the Tauchnitz. I read, chiefly, novels. You do not approve of that? But, yes, I like them; because it is life."
"Is it life?" said Derwentwater, who was somewhat contemptuous of fiction.
"At least it is England," said Bice. "The girls who will not make a good marriage because of some one else, or because it is their parents who arrange it. That is how Lady Randolph speaks. She says that nothing is right but to fall—how do you call it?—in love?—It is not comme il faut even to talk of that."
Derwentwater blushed like a girl. He was more inexperienced in many ways than Bice. "And do you regard it in another point of view?" he said.
Bice laughed out with frank disdain. "Certainly, I regard it different—oh, quite different. That is not what happens in life."
"And do you consider life is chiefly occupied with getting married?" he continued, feeling, along with a good deal of quite unnecessary excitement, a great desire to know what was her way of looking at this great subject. Visions had been flashing recently through his mind, which pointed a little this way too.
"Altogether," said Bice, with great gravity, "how can you begin to live till you have settled that? Till then you do not know what is going to happen to you. When you get up in the morning you know not what may come before the night; when you walk out you know not who may be the next person you meet; perhaps your husband. But then you marry, and that is all settled; henceforward nothing can happen!" said Bice, throwing out her hands. "Then, after all is settled, you can begin to live."
"This is very interesting," said Derwentwater, "I am so glad to get at a real and individual view. But this, perhaps, only applies to—ladies? It is, perhaps, not the same with men?"
Bice gave him a careless, half-contemptuous glance. "I have never known anything," she said, "about men."
There are many girls, much more innocent in outward matters than Bice, who would have said these words with an intention agaçante—the intention of leading to a great deal more badinage. But Bice spoke with a calm, almost scornful, composure. She had no desire to agacer She looked him in the face as tranquilly as if he had been an old woman. And so far as she was concerned he might have been an old woman; for he had virtually no existence in his capacity of young man. Had she possessed any clue to the thoughts that had taken rise in his mind, the new revelation which she had conveyed to him, Bice's amazement would have been without bounds. But instinct indicated to her that the interview should proceed no further. She waved her hand to him as she came to a cross road which led into the woods. "I am going this way," she cried, darting off round the corner of a great tree. He stood and looked after her bewildered, as her light figure skimmed along into the depths of the shadows. "Then, after all is settled, you can begin to live," he repeated to himself. Was it true? He had got up the morning on which he saw her first without any thought that everything might be changed for him that day. And now it was quite true that there lay before him an interval which must be somehow filled up before he could begin to live. How was it to be filled up? Would she have anything to do with the settling which must precede his recommencement of existence? He went on with his mind altogether absorbed in these thoughts, and with a thrill and tingling through all his veins. And that was the only time he encountered Bice, for whom in fact, though he had not hitherto allowed it even to himself, he had come to the Hall—till the great night.