“Yes. Talking to Lynes, I mean.”
“Oh! talking to Lynes. To be sure—— You were so nice to him, dear boy; thank you.”
Duty—the word gave her a small chill. She bent over the fire in the sitting-room, poking it into a blaze; the logs fell apart and shot up into flame.
“I do like a wood fire,” said Mrs. Martin. She held out her hands towards it; they were cold. She had not known, until that moment, how cold she had been.
VIII
They were at dinner. How nice Henry looked in his evening clothes; she liked his lean brown hands, and the gesture with which he smoothed back his hair. She smiled fondly as she thought how attractive all women must find Henry. Life on a ranch had not coarsened him; far from it. He was sensitive and masculine both, an ideal combination.
“Dear Henry!” she murmured.
He leant over and patted her hand, but there was an absent look in his eyes, and his manner was slightly more perfunctory than it had been at luncheon. Anyone but Mrs. Martin would have suspected that he could assume that manner at will—had, in fact, assumed it often, towards many women who had misinterpreted it, and whom he had forgotten as soon as they were out of sight. They had reproached him sometimes; there was a fair echo of reproaches in Henry’s life. He had always felt aggrieved when they reproached him; couldn’t they understand that he was kind-hearted really? that he only wanted to please? To make life agreeable? He hated saying anything disagreeable to anybody, but greatly preferred enrolling them among the victims of his charm—which he could turn on, at a moment’s notice, like turning on a tap—and if they misunderstood him, he did not consider that he had been to blame. Not that he remained to argue the matter out. It was far easier, in most cases, simply to go right away instead, without giving any explanation, right away to where the clamour that was sure to arise would not reach his ears at all. And sometimes, when he had not managed so skilfully as usual, and things had been, briefly, tiresome, he would criticize himself to the extent of thinking that he was a damned fool to have, incorrigibly, so little foresight of where the easy path was leading him.
Yet he was not quite right about this, for he was perfectly well able to recognize the progress of his own drifting; but he recognized it as though it applied to some other person, in whose affairs he was himself unable to interfere. He watched himself as he might have watched another man, thinking meanwhile, with an amused contempt and a certain compassion, “How the dickens is he going to get himself out of this?”