‘You didn’t like her, then?’
‘No, nor she me.’ He laughed briefly. ‘But she had a power, I admit. I intend to go and find her again some day. I dare say I might make her—like me.’
‘I don’t think you could!’ She wanted to strike him for his cold-blooded self-assurance. ‘If you think you could—manage her, control her, I pity you, that’s all! I’d like to see you try! You’d think you’d got her easily—and then in another moment she’d have slipped through your fingers.... How I’d laugh!... Personally I didn’t need to make her like me: she just did.’
She felt that she was speaking wildly, and fell silent, weak before the flooding onslaught of the past.
It was too much pain. What was the use of trying to go on? You could never get free of the past. It came all around again at a word, and in a trice all save its shadows was trivial and insubstantial.
Julian was watching her; raising his eyebrows in a pretense of polite surprise and watching closely.
‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘Calm yourself, my serpent. You have convinced me my best endeavours would be wasted.’
She hid her face, stooping it over the table with both hands across her forehead, feeling the nausea and sweat of faintness.
He helped himself to grapes and remarked:
‘Not that I shan’t be sorry never to see her on a horse again. She looked magnificent.’