As much as anything else, perhaps, it was the fear of what one of the men might say to me that made me for an hour or two, at this crisis, continuously shy.Nobody, doubtless, would have said anything worse than that she was more of a flirt than ever, that they had all compared notes and would accordingly be interested in some hint of another, possibly a deeper, experience.It would have been almost as embarrassing to have to tell them how little experience I had had in fact as to have had to tell them how much I had had in fancy--all the more that I had as yet only my thin idea of the line of feeling in her that had led her so to spare me.Tea on the terraces represented, meanwhile, among us, so much neglect of everything else that my meditations remained for some time as unobserved as I could desire.
I was not, moreover, heeding much where they carried me, and became aware of what I owed them only on at last finding myself anticipated as the occupant of an arbour into which I had strolled.Then I saw I had reached a remote part of the great gardens, and that for some of my friends also secluded thought had inducements; though it was not, I hasten to add, that either of the pair I here encountered appeared to be striking out in any very original direction.Lady John and Guy Brissenden, in the arbour, were thinking secludedly together; they were together, that is, because they were scarce a foot apart, and they were thinking, I inferred, because they were doing nothing else.Silence, by every symptom, had definitely settled on them, and whatever it was I interrupted had no resemblance to talk.Nothing--in the general air of evidence had more struck me than that what Lady John's famous intellect seemed to draw most from Brissenden's presence was the liberty to rest.Yet it shook off this languor as soon as she saw me; it threw itself straight into the field; it went, I could see, through all the motions required of it by her ladyship's fallacious philosophy.I could mark these emotions, and what determined them, as behind clear glass.
I found, on my side, a rare intellectual joy, the oddest secret exultation, in feeling her begin instantly to play the part I had attributed to her in the irreducible drama.She broke out in a manner that could only have had for its purpose to represent to me that mere weak amiability had committed her to such a predicament.It was to humour her friend's husband that she had strayed so far, for she was somehow sorry for him, and--good creature as we all knew her--had, on principle, a kind little way of her own with silly infatuations.His WAS silly, but it was unmistakable, and she had for some time been finding it, in short, a case for a special tact.That he bored her to death I might have gathered by the way they sat there, and she could trust me to believe--couldn't she?--that she was only musing as to how she might most humanely get rid of him.She would lead him safely back to the fold if I would give her time.She seemed to ask it all, oddly, of me, to take me remarkably into her confidence, to refer me, for a specimen of his behaviour, to his signal abandonment of his wife the day before, his having waited over, to come down, for the train in which poor SHE was to travel.It was at all events, I felt, one of the consequences of having caught on to so much that I by this time found myself catching on to everything.
I read into Lady John's wonderful manner--which quite clamoured, moreover, for an interpretation--all that was implied in the lesson I had extracted from other portions of the business.It was distinctly poor she who gave me the lead, and it was not less definite that she put it to me that Ishould render her a service either by remaining with them or by inventing something-that would lure her persecutor away.She desired him, even at the cost of her being left alone, distracted from his pursuit.
Poor he, in his quarter, I hasten to add, contributed to my picking out this embroidery nothing more helpful than a sustained detachment.He said as little as possible, seemed heedless of what was otherwise said, and only gave me on his own account a look or two of dim suggestiveness.