The Marchesino burst into a laugh. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head, and holding the table with his two hands. His white teeth gleamed.
“What is the joke?” asked Artois.
Vere turned her head.
“Oh, nothing. It’s too silly. I can’t imagine why the Marchesino is so much amused by it.”
Artois felt shut out. But when Vere and he had laughed over the tea-table in a blessed community of happy foolishness, who could have understood their mirth? He remembered how he had pitied the imagined outsider.
He turned again to Hermione, but such conversation as theirs, and indeed all serious conversation, now seemed to him heavy, portentous, almost ludicrous. The young alone knew how to deal with life, chasing it as a child chases a colored air-ball, and when it would sink, and fall and be inert, sending it with a gay blow soaring once more towards the blue.
Perhaps Hermione had a similar thought, or perhaps she knew of it in him. At any rate, for a moment she had nothing to say. Nor had he. And so, tacitly excluded, as it seemed, from the merriment of the young ones, the two elders remained looking towards each other in silence, sunk in a joint exile.
Presently Artois began to fidget with his bread. He pulled out some of the crumb from his roll, and pressed it softly between his large fingers, and scattered the tiny fragments mechanically over the table-cloth near his plate. Hermione watched his moving hand. The Marchesino was talking now. He was telling Vere about a paper-chase at Capodimonte, which had started from the Royal Palace. His vivacity, his excitement made a paper-chase seem one of the most brilliant and remarkable events in a brilliant and remarkable world. He had been the hare. And such a hare! Since hares were first created and placed in the Garden of Eden there had been none like unto him. He told of his cunning exploits.
The fingers of Artois moved faster. Hermione glanced at his face. Its massiveness looked heavy. The large eyes were fixed upon the table-cloth. His hand just then was more expressive. And as she glanced at it again something very pitiful awoke in her, something pitiful for him and for herself. She felt that very often lately she had misunderstood him—she had been confused about him. But now, in this moment, she understood him perfectly.
He pulled some more crumb out of his roll.