The speaker’s eyes, sometimes gently cynical, are alive and shining with recent emotion, gratitude, and pleasure. In them she also reads the desire for an embrace. Why she does not meet it with the not particularly reluctant acquiescence that is usual to her, she could not tell you, if you had asked her. With tactful self-denial, Rupert at once resigns his pretensions to a congratulatory kiss.
“He called me ‘my boy’ over and over again!” he says, with a gratification none the less intense for being quiet. “You know that I always feel as if I could die a hundred deaths for him, when he calls me ‘my boy.’”
“You are a ‘Boy’ and I am a ‘Mosquito’!” replies she, with what she feels to be a hateful dry laugh. Hitherto one of the qualities she has most admired in her cousin has been the gentle forgivingness and self-restraint which has characterized his attitude towards his father—the filial piety, which has survived so many buffets. Now she tells herself that the sentiment which makes his voice quiver is hysterical, and that a man’s tears should not be so near his eyes. No one but Rupert, however—and she trusts that not even he—would read these harsh comments between the lines of the hastily candid “Yes, I know you would,” with which she supplements her first utterance.
Does his changing the subject mean that he comprehends? Impossible! Yet he does change it.
“Rather an unlucky thing has happened,” he says, in a voice that has altered, like his theme. “You have heard me mention Dubary Jones?”
For a moment she looks perfectly vague, then, “Of course I have! He introduced you to the editor of the Flail; and he writes poetry himself?”
It is the measure of how far her thoughts have strayed from Rupert and his group of æsthetics, that she should be so painstakingly detailed in proving that they have come back.
“His translations of Verlaine were very remarkable, if you remember,” replies Rupert, kindly jogging her memory. It needs the assistance given, presenting for the time a perfect blank as to what the bard in question’s bid for immortality consists of. “I have had a wire from him, asking me to put him up for the night. He is staying with the Tanquerays. He has been of great use to me in various ways, and I did not quite like to refuse him.”
Between each sentence the young man makes a slight pause, as if to give room for an expression of approval or acquiescence, but it is not before the full stop at the end that Lavinia is ready.
“Of course you accepted him? You were perfectly right. What else could you do?”