“That is why your eyes look so bright!” said St. Jerome, lightly. As a matter of fact he suspected her of taking morphia.
“Oh, I had a better reason than that!” she said, impatiently. “Tell me, do you know an artist called Rivers?”
“Was he your reason? And a very nice reason too!”
“Mr. St. Jerome, you are chaffing me, and it is not fair, as I come from the provinces! Besides,” she explained, beginning to be terrified at the possible consequences of her imprudence, “I hardly know Mr. Rivers. I met him here for the first time at tea.”
“Of course you did!”
Mrs. Elles inferred from this speech that Rivers was a constant visitor at Egidia’s tea-table, which is perhaps what St. Jerome intended her to do. She was piqued. “I—that is we—are going to tea with him in his studio, one of these days,” she remarked.
“I congratulate you! Rivers is not a quiet tea-party man at all, and enjoys the reputation of being a misogynist. I have long tried to acquire it in vain. Naturally all your sex are devoted to him. He takes it very well, I must say, and shows no signs of being unduly puffed up. A lady’s man sans le savior!”
“There are a good many people like that!” remarked Mrs. Elles, though in her heart of hearts she thought there was but one. But she wanted to draw the polite and analytical novelist, and lead him on to discuss the man she loved.
“Yes, and all the women adore them, confound it! They mistake; they see the man full of energy and spirit, making for a given point in life, and allowing nothing to distract his attention from it, like a horse with blinkers on. They naturally want to remove the blinkers, and divert a little of that force and energy into a more useful channel, i. e., love-making. They take no account of the correlation of forces; they don’t see that what a man gives to one thing he cannot give to another, that dominated as he is by an abstraction, charming concrete objects”—he looked at Mrs. Elles—“have no chance at all!”
“You are making Mr. Rivers out a mild kind of Robespierre!”