I envy you, for nothing would induce me to let you know mine.You look, you see, just twenty-five."It evidently too, what I said, gave her pleasure--a pleasure that she caught and held."Well, you can't say I dress it.""No, you dress, I make out, ninety-three.If you WOULD only dress twenty-five you'd look fifteen.""Fifteen in a schoolroom charade!" She laughed at this happily enough.
"Your compliment to my taste is odd.I know, at all events," she went on, "what's the difference in Mr.Long.""Be so good then, for my relief, as to name it.""Well, a very clever woman has for some time past--""Taken"--this beginning was of course enough--"a particular interest in him? Do you mean Lady John?" I inquired; and, as she evidently did, I rather demurred."Do you call Lady John a very clever woman?""Surely.That's why I kindly arranged that, as she was to take, I happened to learn, the next train, Guy should come with her.""You arranged it?" I wondered."She's not so clever as you then.""Because you feel that SHE wouldn't, or couldn't? No doubt she wouldn't have made the same point of it--for more than one reason.Poor Guy hasn't pretensions--has nothing but his youth and his beauty.But that's precisely why I'm sorry for him and try whenever I can to give him a lift.Lady John's company IS, you see, a lift.""You mean it has so unmistakably been one to Long?""Yes--it has positively given him a mind and a tongue.THAT'S what has come over him.""Then," I said, "it's a most extraordinary case--such as one really has never met.""Oh, but," she objected, "it happens."
"Ah, so very seldom! Yes--I've positively never met it.Are you very sure," I insisted, "that Lady John IS the influence?""I don't mean to say, of course," she replied, "that he looks fluttered if you mention her, that he doesn't in fact look as blank as a pickpocket.
But that proves nothing--or rather, as they're known to be always together, and she from morning till night as pointed as a hat-pin, it proves just what one sees.One simply takes it in."I turned the picture round."They're scarcely together when she's together with Brissenden.""Ah, that's only once in a way.It's a thing that from time to time such people--don't you know?--make a particular point of: they cultivate, to cover their game, the appearance of other little friendships.It puts outsiders off the scent, and the real thing meanwhile goes on.Besides, you yourself acknowledge the effect.If she hasn't made him clever, what has she made him? She has given him, steadily, more and more intellect.""Well, you may be right," I laughed, "though you speak as if it were cod-liver oil.Does she administer it, as a daily dose, by the spoonful?
or only as a drop at a time? Does he take it in his food? Is he supposed to know? The difficulty for me is simply that if I've seen the handsome grow ugly and the ugly handsome, the fat grow thin and the thin fat, the short grow long and the long short; if I've even, likewise, seen the clever, as I've too fondly, at least, supposed them, grow stupid: so have I NOTseen--no, not once in all my days--the stupid grow clever."It was a question, none the less, on which she could perfectly stand up."All I can say is then that you'll have, the next day or two, an interesting new experience.""It WILL be interesting," I declared while I thought--"and all the more if I make out for myself that Lady John IS the agent.""You'll make it out if you talk to her--that is, I mean, if you make HER talk.You'll see how she CAN.""She keeps her wit then," I asked, "in spite of all she pumps into others?""Oh, she has enough for two!"
"I'm immensely struck with yours," I replied, "as well as with your generosity.I've seldom seen a woman take so handsome a view of another.""It's because I like to be kind!" she said with the best faith in the world; to which I could only return, as we entered the train, that it was a kindness Lady John would doubtless appreciate.Long rejoined us, and we ran, as I have said, our course; which, as I have also noted, seemed short to me in the light of such a blaze of suggestion.To each of my companions--and the fact stuck out of them--something unprecedented had happened.