‘Shall we go in and have tea—yes?’ said Gundred, with gentle dignity, into which was mixed a fine proportion of reproof. She rose and moved towards the door. Isabel looked after her.
‘I have shocked Gundred,’ she said candidly and callously. ‘I suppose I was bound to. She is too fascinating and pretty for words, but I don’t feel, somehow, as if her soul and mine were really cousins. I’m sorry if I have hurt her. It is all my fault. One is such a fool. One gets interested in an idea, and off one goes at score, and nothing else matters in the world but the hunting of it down. You are like that, too, though you are pretending hard not to be. Why do you? Are you trying to match Gundred? You’ll never be able to, you know.’
She looked up at him, laughing. Her face had a radiant, exasperating vitality. In that moment he disliked her more even for what she had than for what she lacked.
‘Don’t see how you can possibly tell that,’ he said, standing over her, with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair; ‘and I don’t see that it matters—to you, at all events.’
‘A perfect match,’ continued Isabel, pursuing her thought with no attention to Kingston—‘a perfect match—I suppose it is when neither husband nor wife is a match for the other. No, it doesn’t matter a bit. Only I am interested. I always am. I have only just arrived from the back of beyond, and yet I feel as if I had known you both—known you, at least, for half a dozen centuries. I can see all sorts of odd things in your mind—things that you have no idea of. You are quite naked to me as I look at you.’
Kingston conceived an instant red desire to shake and maltreat this insolent barbarian.
‘Are you coming in to tea?’ he asked, turning away as if to leave her.
Isabel sat up in the long garden chair in which she had been lounging.
‘Stop,’ she said.
Angrily, against his will, he stopped and turned towards her. Her voice compelled him. Unknown voices were answering her in his heart.