“I think, if you go as you are, the brambles in the wood will not leave you many of those jingly things.”
“The wood!” repeated she, with a sudden clouding of the brow.
Being much more innocent-minded than she, and accustomed to much more cleanly company, he had not the dimmest suspicion that his mention of the harmless coppice in question had re-aroused her misgivings. They had been almost completely lulled by his demeanour hitherto; but had he been acting all this while? Had his cool and distant friendliness—so improbable in the face of all her experience of men—been assumed only to lead up to this ominous wood? It could be safely said that with not one of Claire’s and her own former intimates would she have for an instant thought of trusting herself in a shady grove.
The thought that his apparently harmless proposition implied an intended enterprise of the usual sort inspired her with no particular disgust. He would only be acting after his kind. All men were alike. This formula, from which she had hitherto had no cause to make any exception, covered with its contemptuous generality her whole masculine acquaintance, actual and possible.
“Well, does the wood frighten you?” he asked, with a slight and most unsuspicious laugh at the perturbation and doubt written in her face. “What do you think will happen to you in it?”
If she answered him truly—which, to do her justice, was the last thing that she had ever any temptation to do—he would probably think it necessary to pretend indignation, and go off in a huff without her, so she temporized.
“It only just struck me that possibly I might be out too late; that Mrs. Tancred might want me.”
“Camilla never wants any one on Sunday afternoon,” returned he, with a sort of compassionate amusement at the idea of his wife ever “wanting,” or doing anything but groan under, the society of her little incubus; “and besides, it was her own suggestion.”
There was no more to be said, and, remarking to herself in derisive gaiety, that “There is no fool like an old fool,” Miss Ransome skipped off to make grudging modifications in her costume.
“Toby would have preferred me as I was,” was her final verdict on her own reflected image; “but I have no doubt that I am good enough, and too good for him, as I am.”