Bice gave him a look half friendly, half disdainful. "I like living," she said. "In the country in what you call the quiet, it is only to be half alive: we are always living here. But you never come to see us ride, to be among the crowd. You are never at the opera. You don't talk as those others do——"
"Montjoie, for instance," said Jock, with a strange sense of jealousy and pain.
"Very well, Montjoie. He is what you call fun; he has always something to say, bêtises perhaps, but what does that matter? He makes me laugh."
"Makes you laugh! at his wit perhaps?" cried Jock. "Oh, what things girls are! Laugh at what a duffer like that, an ass, a fellow that has not two ideas, says."
"You have a great many ideas," said Bice; "you are clever—you know a number of things; but you are not so amusing, and you are not so good-natured. You scold me; and you say another, a friend, is an ass——"
"He was never any friend of mine," said Jock, with a hot flush of anger. "That fellow! I never had anything to say to him."
"No," said Bice, with a smiling disdain which cut poor Jock like a knife. "I made a mistake, that was not possible, for he is a man and you are only a boy."
To describe Jock's feelings under this blow would be beyond the power of words. He inferior to Montjoie! he only a boy while the other was a man! Rage was nothing in such an emergency. He looked at her with eyes that were almost pathetic in their sense of unappreciated merit, and, deeper sting still, of folly preferred. In spite of himself, Locksley Hall and those musings which have become, by no fault of the poet's, the expression of a despair which is half ridiculous, came into his mind. He did not see the ridicule. "Having known me to decline"—his eyes became moist with a dew of pain—"If you think that," he said slowly, "Bice——"
Bice answered only with a laugh. "Let us make haste; let us run," she cried. "It is so early, no one will see us. Why don't you ride, it is like flying? And to run is next best." She stopped after a flight, swift as a bird, along an unfrequented path which lay still in the April sunshine, the lilac bushes standing up on each side all athrill and rustling with the spring, with eyes that shone like stars, and that unusual colour which made her radiant. Jock, though he could have gone on much faster, was behind her for the moment, and came up after her, more occupied by the shame of being outrun and laughed at than by admiration of the girl and her beauty. She was more conscious of her own splendour of bloom than he was: though Bice was not vain, and he was more occupied by the thought of her than by any other thought.
"Girls never think of being able to stay," he said, "you do only what can be done with a rush; but that's not running. If you had ever seen the School Mile——"