"Pardon me," he said, with his most cynical smile. "In attributing disinterested affection to ladies, I think 'quelque disposition qu'ait le monde à mal juger, il fait plus souvent grace au faux mérite qu'il ne fait injustice au véritable.'"
The Tressillian's soft lips curved angrily; she turned away, and began to sing again, at Walsham's entreaty. Telfer got up and lounged over to Virginie, with whom he laughed, talked, waltzed, and played chess for the rest of the evening.
III.
FROM WHICH IT WOULD APPEAR, THAT IT IS SOMETIMES WELL TO BEGIN WITH A LITTLE AVERSION.
After this split, Telfer and the Tressillian were rather further off each other than before; and whenever riding, and driving, at dinner, or in lionizing, they came by chance together, he avoided her silently as much as ever he could, without making a parade of it. Violet could see very well how cordially he hated her, and, woman-like, I dare say mine, and Edenburgh's, and Walsham's, and all her devoted friends' admiration was valueless, as long as her vowed enemy treated her with such careless contempt.
One morning the two foes met by chance. Telfer and I, after a late night over at Pipesandbeersbad, with lansquenet, cheroots, and cognac, had betaken ourselves out to whip the Beersbad, whose fish, for all their boiling by the hot springs, are first-rate, I can assure you. Telfer tells you he likes fishing, but I never see that he does much more than lie full length under the shadiest tree he can find, with his cap over his eyes and his cigar in his mouth, doing the dolce lazily enough. A three-pound trout had no power to rouse him; and he's lost a salmon before now in the Tweed because it bored him to play it! Shade of old Izaak! is that liking fishing? But few things ever did excite him, except it was a charge, or a Kaffir scrimmage; and then he looked more like a concentrated tempest than anything else, and woe to the turban that his sabre came down upon.
That part of the stream we'd tried first had been whipped before us, or the fish wouldn't bite; and I, who haven't as much patience as I might have, went up higher to try my luck. Telfer declined to come; he was comfortable, he said, and out of the sun; he preferred "Indiana" and his cheroot to catching all the fish in the Beersbad, so I bid him good-bye, and left him smoking and reading at his leisure under the linden-trees. I went further on than I had meant, up round a bend of the river, and was too absorbed in filling my basket to notice a storm coming up from the west, till I began to find myself getting wet to the skin, and the lightning flying up and down the hills round Essellau. I looked for the Major as I passed the lime-trees, but he wasn't there, and I made the best of my way back to the castle, supposing he'd got there before me; but I was mistaken.
"I've seen nothing of him," said Marc. "He's stalking about the woods, I dare say, admiring the lightning. That's more than the poor Tressillian does, I bet. She went out by herself, I believe, just before the storm, to get a water-lily she wanted to paint, and hasn't appeared since. By Jove! if Telfer should have to play knight-errant to his 'pet aversion,' what fun it would be."
Marc had his fun, for an hour afterwards, when the storm had blown over, up the terrace steps came Violet and the Major. They weren't talking to each other, but they were actually walking together; and the courtesy with which he put a dripping rose-branch out of her path with his stick, was something quite new.