“Rupert!” he says, repeating the name lingeringly, and with an involuntarily reluctant intonation. “Yes; I have heard of Rupert.”
“From Bill?”
“Yes, from Bill—and from others.”
The slight hesitation that intervenes between “Bill” and the “others” tells her that he knows. How should he not know, indeed? Is it likely that, in his state of tedious invalidhood, he should not have been told any bit of local gossip that might give him a moment’s distraction? To him, her engagement to marry Rupert is just a bit of local gossip, neither more nor less. No doubt that the news was imparted—why should it not be?—by Féodorovna.
“So you see,” she says, struggling with the senseless feeling of resentment and vexation that has invaded her heart, “my time is not always my own.”
“I see!” He lies quite silent for a minute or two, looking out of the window at a burgeoning sycamore, then adds, in a would-be cheerful voice, “It is kind of him to spare you to me for half an hour; but he seemed such a kind fellow when he came to see me the other day: one of my bandages got a little out of gear, and he put it right for me, with a touch as gentle as a woman’s.”
She repeats “as a woman’s,” like a parrot, with the bitter thought that even this generously meant encomium takes the feminine shape that all praise of Rupert must do. No one can deny that the bridegroom she has chosen can hold his own as a judge of lace, mender of china, and shaker of pillows, with any expert in either of these three branches of accomplishment in Europe. The cloud on her brow must be a visible one, for the sick man’s next remark has a note of doubt and trouble in it.
“I have often heard Bill talk of him. Though they were not alike in externals, nor, I imagine, in tastes, they meant a great deal to each other.”
The sentence is evidently intended as a statement, but takes a perverse interrogative twist at the end.
“People may mean a great deal to each other without having a single taste in common,” she replies; and the answer leaves on both their minds a painful sense of having incomprehensibly offended on the one side, and of having bristled in uncalled-for defence on the other.