“Fairly,” she said, not without surprise at her own calmness; and there was an instant of silence, during which the commonplace seemed to be dismissed between them.
“You made a vivid impression here last year,” said Alicia. She felt delightfully terse and to the point.
“You mean Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay is very impressionable. Do you know him well?”
Alicia closed her lips, and a faint line graved itself on each side of them. Her whole face sounded a retreat, and her eyes were cold—it would have annoyed her to know how cold—with distance.
“He is an old friend of my brother's,” she said. Hilda had the sensation of coming unexpectedly, through the lightest loam, upon a hard surface. She looked attentively at the red heart of her cigarette crisped over with grey, in its blackened calyx.
“Most impressionable,” she went on, as if Alicia had not spoken. “As to the rest of the people—bah! you can't rouse Calcutta. It is sunk in its torpid liver, and imagines itself superior. It's really funny, you know, the way hepatic influences can be idealised—made to serve ennobling ends. But Mr. Lindsay is—different.”
“Yes?” Miss Livingstone's intention was neutral, but, in spite of her, the asking note was in the word.
“We have done some interesting things together here. He has shown me the queerest places. Yesterday he made me go with him to Wellesley Square, to look at his latest enthusiasm standing in the middle of it.”
“A statue?”
“No, a woman, preaching and warbling to the people. She wasn't new to me—I knew her before he did—but the picture was, and the performance. She stood poised on a coolie's basket in the midst of a rabble of all colours, like a fallen angel—I mean a dropped one. Light seemed to come from her, from her hair or her eyes or something. I almost expected to see her sail away over the palms into the sunset when it was ended.”