The tide was nearly up; the South wind driving over it brought him the scent of the sea-flowers, and the crisp rustle of little waves swimming almost to his feet. Far out, where the sunlight fell, the smiling waters lay white and mysterious in July haze, giving him a queer feeling. But Lord Dennis, though he had his moments of poetic sentiment, was on the whole quite able to keep the sea in its proper place--for after all it was the English Channel; and like a good Englishman he recognized that if you once let things get away from their names, they ceased to be facts, and if they ceased to be facts, they became--the devil! In truth he was not thinking much of the sea, but of Barbara. It was plain that she was in trouble of some kind. And the notion that Babs could find trouble in life was extraordinarily queer; for he felt, subconsciously, what a great driving force of disturbance was necessary to penetrate the hundred folds of the luxurious cloak enwrapping one so young and fortunate.
It was not Death; therefore it must be Love; and he thought at once of that fellow with the red moustaches. Ideas were all very well--no one would object to as many as you liked, in their proper place--the dinner-table, for example. But to fall in love, if indeed it were so, with a man who not only had ideas, but an inclination to live up to them, and on them, and on nothing else, seemed to Lord Dennis 'outre'.
She had followed him to the wall, and he looked--at her dubiously.
"To rest in the waters of Lethe, Babs? By the way, seen anything of our friend Mr. Courtier? Very picturesque--that Quixotic theory of life!"And in saying that, his voice (like so many refined voices which have turned their backs on speculation) was triple-toned-mocking at ideas, mocking at itself for mocking at ideas, yet showing plainly that at bottom it only mocked at itself for mocking at ideas, because it would be, as it were, crude not to do so.
But Barbara did not answer his question, and began to speak of other things. And all that afternoon and evening she talked away so lightly that Lord Dennis, but for his instinct, would have been deceived.
That wonderful smiling mask--the inscrutability of Youth--was laid aside by her at night. Sitting at her window, under the moon, 'a gold-bright moth slow-spinning up the sky,' she watched the darkness hungrily, as though it were a great thought into whose heart she was trying to see. Now and then she stroked herself, getting strange comfort out of the presence of her body. She had that old unhappy feeling of having two selves within her. And this soft night full of the quiet stir of the sea, and of dark immensity, woke in her a terrible longing to be at one with something, somebody, outside herself. At the Ball last night the 'flying feeling' had seized on her again; and was still there--a queer manifestation of her streak of recklessness. And this result of her contacts with Courtier, this 'cacoethes volandi', and feeling of clipped wings, hurt her--as being forbidden hurts a child.