He shook his head, and said that he preferred to stand. She had to go back to her sofa thwarted, though in so small a thing, while he remained by the door. He made her sitting-room appear tawdry, with its little gilt chairs and lacy cushions and pink carpet, so much did he rob people and objects of all but their true significance. She was almost ashamed of her surroundings, and was thankful that he could not see them, but she thought that it would take more than mere blindness to stay his more perilous vision down through the embellishments into anybody’s soul. She was conscious of saying to herself, “This won’t do,” and of taking herself sharply in hand. “This is to be my game,” she insisted, “not his.”
X
She had failed entirely to make him sit down, for he continued to refuse her invitation with the same haughty gravity, and responded not at all to the one or two phrases with which she tried him.
“I have heard reports of your fame as a public speaker, Dene,” she said with a propitiatory smile, forgetting for the moment that her smiles were wasted on him.
“A lot of the chaps speak, my lady.”
“But without your advantages. Sir Robert tells me you are a very highly-educated man.”
“No such luck, my lady.”
“Oh, come, Dene? Sir Robert says you are a great reader.”
“Somebody must ha’ been kiddin’ Sir Robert, my lady.”
She delighted in him. He was perfectly grave, and affected a Lincolnshire accent, which he certainly had not possessed when he first came into the room; a subtle insolence, but one which she did not resent, for it demonstrated him as unwilling to prance out his tricks, cheaply, at the bidding of a sophisticated curiosity, and she was a woman who knew how to esteem superficial, although perhaps not fundamental dignity. (Malleson had fundamental dignity, which, poor man, had not served him to very much purpose with his wife.) Also, she was emphatically a woman who maintained that the first duty of sex in the game was to be a danger to the opposite sex. Dene—certainly Dene fulfilled both these conditions! Acquaintance such as hers with him was like a sojourn at the foot of a volcano which might at any moment erupt. She relished the peril of the game. How she stirred him to extravagance after extravagance! how she poked and probed and decoyed his mind! encouraging, insinuating, blowing upon the ready spark; “baiting Silas Dene,” she called it, as a baron might have said, “baiting the bear”; all the better sport because she knew it to be so quick with danger. She sent for him as often as she dared, and when he was absent she thought about him, but always as an experiment, an intellectual exercise. She was too cold-blooded a schemer to allow herself to think of him now as anything else....