Though a mauvish pink in complexion, Lady Pollacke was so like her own white horse that whinnyingly rather than winningly would perhaps have been the apter word. I have read somewhere that this human resemblance to horses sometimes accompanies unusual intelligence. The poet, William Wordsworth, was like a horse; I have seen his portrait. And I should like to see Dean Swift's. Whether or not, the unexpected arrival of this visitor betrayed me into some little gaucherie, and for a moment I still sat on, as she had discovered me, literally "floored" by my novel. Then I scrambled with what dignity I could to my feet, and chased after my manners.
"And not merely that," continued my visitor, seating herself on a horsehair easy-chair, "but among my still older friends is Mr Pellew. So you see—you see," she repeated, apparently a little dazzled by the light of my window, "that we need no introduction, and that I know all—all the circumstances." She lowered a plump, white-kidded hand to her lap, as if, providentially, there all the circumstances lay.
Unlike Mr Crimble, Lady Pollacke had not come to make excuses, but to bring me an invitation—nothing less than to take tea with her on the following Thursday afternoon. But first she hoped—she was sure, in fact, and she satisfied herself with a candid gaze round my apartment—that I was comfortable with Mrs Bowater; "a thoroughly trustworthy and sagacious woman, though, perhaps, a little eccentric in address."
I assured her that I was so comfortable that some of my happiest hours were spent gossiping with my landlady over my supper.
"Ah, yes," she said, "that class of person tells us such very interesting things occasionally, do they not? Yet I am convinced that the crying need in these days is for discrimination. Uplift, by all means, but we mustn't confuse. What does the old proverb say: Festina lente: there's still truth in that. Now, had I known your father—but there; we must not rake in old ashes. We are clean, I see; and quiet and secluded."
Her equine glance made a rapid circuit of the photographs and ornaments that diversified the walls, and I simply couldn't help thinking what a queer little cage they adorned for so large and handsome a bird, the kind of bird, as one might say, that is less weight than magnitude.
I was still casting my eye up and down her silk and laces when she abruptly turned upon me with a direct question: "You seldom, I suppose, go out?"
Possibly if Lady Pollacke had not at this so composedly turned her full face on me—with its exceedingly handsome nose—her bonnet might have remained only vaguely familiar. Now as I looked at her, it was as if the full moon had risen. She was, without the least doubt in the world, the lady who had bowed to Mr Crimble from her carriage that fateful afternoon. A little countenance is not, perhaps, so tell-tale as a large one. (I remember, at any rate, the horrid shock I once experienced when my father set me up on his hand one day to show me my own face, many times magnified, in his dressing-room shaving-glass.) But my eyes must have narrowed a little, for Lady Pollacke's at once seemed to set a little harder. And she was still awaiting an answer to her question.
"'Go out'!" I repeated meditatively, "not very much, Lady Pollacke; at least not in crowded places. The boys, you know."
"Ah, yes, the boys." It was Mr Crimble's little dilemma all over again: Lady Pollacke was evidently wondering whether I knew she knew I knew.