CHAPTER VIII
“I have outstayed all the rest,” Lindsay said, with his hat and stick in his hand, in Alicia Livingstone's drawing-room, “because I want particularly to talk to you. They have left me precious little time,” he added, glancing at his watch.
She had wondered when he came, early in the formal Sunday noon hour for men's calls, since he had more casual privileges; and wondered more when he sat on with composure, as one who is master of the situation, while Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries came and went. There was a mist in her brain as she talked to the Major-Generals and Deputy-Secretaries—it did not in the least obscure what she found to say—and in the midst of it the formless idea that he must wish to attach a special importance to his visit. This took shape and line when they were alone, and he spoke of out-sitting the others. It impelled her to walk to the window and open it. “You might stay to lunch,” she said, addressing a pair of crows in altercation on the verandah.
“There is nearly half an hour before lunch,” he said. “Can I convince you in that time, I wonder, that I'm not an absolute fool?”
Alicia turned and came back to her sofa. She may have had a prevision of the need of support. “I hardly think,” she said, drawing the long breath with which we try to subdue a tempest within, “that it would take so long.” She looked with careful criticism at the violets in his buttonhole.
“I've had a supreme experience,” he said, “very strange and very lovely. I am living in it, moving in it, speaking in it,” he added quickly, watching her face; “so don't, for Heaven's sake, touch it roughly.”
She lifted her hand in nervous, involuntary deprecation. “Why should you suppose I would touch it roughly?” There was that in her voice which cried out that she would rather not touch it at all; but Lindsay, on the brink of his confidence, could not suppose it, did not hear it. He knew her so well.
“A great many people will,” he said. “I can't bear the thought of their fingers. That is one reason that brings me to you.”
She faced him fully at this; her eyelids quivered, but she looked straight at him. It nerved her to be brought into his equation, even in the form which should finally be eliminated. She contrived a smile.