But my further little confidences failed to satisfy her.
"But why is she so not an angel, then? Clever and lovely—it's a rather unusual combination, you know. And yet"—she reflectively smiled at me, all candour and gentleness—"well not unique."
I ran away as fast as ever I could with so endearing a compliment—and tossed it back again over my shoulder: "You don't mean, Susan, that you are not clever?"
"I do, my dear; indeed I do. I am so stupid that unless things are as plain and open as the nose on my face, I feel like suffocating. I'm dreadfully out of the fashion—a horrible discredit to my sex. As for Miss Bowater, I was merely being odious, that was all. To be quite honest and hateful—I didn't like the sound of her. And Aunt Alice is so easily carried away by any new scent. If a thing's a novelty, or just good to look at, or what they call a work of art—why, the hunt's up. There wouldn't have been any use for the Serpent in her Eden. Mere things, of course, don't matter much: except that they rather lumber up one's rooms; and I prefer not to live in a museum. It's when it comes to persons. Still, it isn't as if Miss Bowater was coming here."
I remained silent, thinking this speech over. Had it, I speculated, "come to" being a "person" in my own case?
"Did you meet any other interesting people there?" Miss Monnerie went on, as if casually, turning off and on the while the little cluster of coloured electric globes that was on my table. "I mean besides Miss Bowater and that poor, dreadful—you know?"
"No," I said bluntly, "not many."
"You don't mind my asking these questions? And just in exchange, you solemn thing, I'll tell you a secret. It will be like shutting it up in the delightfullest, delicatest little rosebud of a box!" In that instant's pause, it was as if a dream had passed swiftly, entrancingly, across the grave, smiling face.
"Look!" she said, stooping low, and laying her slim left hand, palm downwards, across my table. I did look; and the first thing I noticed was how like herself that hand was, and how much less vigorous and formidable than Fanny's. And then I caught her meaning.
"Oh, Susan," I cried in a woeful voice, gazing at the smouldering stones ringing that long slim third finger, "wherever I turn, I hear that."