"Very strong in one way."
"Very weak in another, perhaps. It would have been better to go and have done with it, than to brood over not having gone."
"You are envying Charmian?"
"Some days I envy everyone who isn't Claude Heath," he answered evasively, with a little covering laugh. "Of one thing I am quite sure, that I wish I were a male Miss Fleet. She knows what few people know."
"What is that?"
"What is small and what is great."
"And you found that out in five minutes at a concert?"
"Elgar's is music that helps the perceptions."
Mrs. Mansfield's perceptions were very keen. Yet she was puzzled by Heath. She realized that he was disturbed and attributed that disturbance to Charmian. Had he suspected, or found out, that Charmian imagined herself to be in love with him? He came as usual to the house. His friendship with Mrs. Mansfield did not seem to her to have changed. But his relation to Charmian was not what it had been. Indeed, it was scarcely possible that it should be so. For Charmian had continued to be definite ever since her drastic remarks at dinner on the evening of her return. She bantered Heath, laughed at him, patronized him in the pretty way of a pretty London girl who takes the world for her own with the hands of youth. When she found him with her mother she did not glide away, or remain as a mere listener while they talked. She stayed to hold her own, sometimes even—so her mother thought, not without pathos—a little aggressively.
Heath's curious and deep reserve, which underlay his apparent quick and sensitive readiness to be sympathetic with those about him, to give them what they wanted of him, was not abated by Charmian's banter, her delicate impertinences, her laughing attacks. Mrs. Mansfield noticed that. He turned to her still when he wished to speak for a moment out of his heart.