I looked at her, and she said at once, ‘No, of course you couldn’t.’
For a moment or two I took my share of the heavy sense of it, my trivial share, which yet was an experience sufficiently exciting. ‘I am afraid it will have to be faced,’ I said.
‘What will happen?’ Anna cried. ‘Oh, what will happen?’
‘Why not the usual thing?’ Lady Chichele looked up quickly as if at a reminder. ‘The ambiguous attachment of the country,’ I went on, limping but courageous, ‘half declared, half admitted, that leads vaguely nowhere, and finally perishes as the man’s life enriches itself—the thing we have seen so often.’
‘Whatever Judy is capable of it won’t be the usual thing. You know that.’
I had to confess in silence that I did.
‘It flashed at me—the difference in her—in Bombay.’ She pressed her lips together and then went on unsteadily. ‘In her eyes, her voice. She was mannered, extravagant, elaborate. With me! All the way up I wondered and worried. But I never thought—’ She stopped; her voice simply shook itself into silence. I called a servant.
‘I am going to give you a good stiff peg,’ I said. I apologize for the ‘peg,’ but not for the whisky and soda. It is a beverage on the frontier, of which the vulgarity is lost in the value. While it was coming I tried to talk of other things, but she would only nod absently in the pauses.
‘Last night we dined with him, it was guest night at the mess, and she was there. I watched her, and she knew it. I don’t know whether she tried, but anyway, she failed. The covenant between them was written on her forehead whenever she looked at him, though that was seldom. She dared not look at him. And the little conversation that they had—you would have laughed—it was a comedy of stutters. The facile Mrs. Harbottle!’
‘You do well to be angry, naturally,’ I said; ‘but it would be fatal to let yourself go, Anna.’