He finished his breakfast hurriedly in an enforced silence and walked out into the garden in the secret hope of finding Beatrice. In this he soon succeeded. She was playing croquet with her daughter on the lawn. Roland stood watching them for a moment and then walked slowly across the lawn. Beatrice glanced up at him and then went on with her game. She did not even smile at him. It would have been too much perhaps to have expected her to ask him to join them, but she might surely have made some sign of comradely recognition. After all, he had the night before taken her down to dinner; he had endeavored to be as nice as he could to her, and it annoyed him and, at the same time, attracted him to feel that he had made absolutely no impression on her.
Roland was not one of those who analyze their emotions. When he was attracted by some new interest he did not put himself in the confessional, and he did not now ask himself why or how Beatrice had appealed to him.
As a matter of fact, she did not attract him physically. Her beauty added to the glamor that enriched her loneliness, but did not touch him otherwise. It was interest he felt for her, a compelling interest for someone outside the circle of his own experience, who was content to disparage what he admired and had filled her own life with other enthusiasms. She was remote, inscrutable. She lived and ate and talked and moved among them, but she had no part there. And because he was so interested in her he was desperately anxious that she should feel some interest in him. She was a mystery for him, but he was not content she should remain a mystery; he wanted to understand her, to become friends, so that in her troubles she should turn to him for sympathy and guidance. How wonderful that would be, that this aloof and beautiful woman should share with him an intimacy that she denied her husband. He would watch her as he had watched her the previous evening moving among her friends, indifferent and apart from them, and they would sit, as they had sat, hardly noticing her, talking of their own affairs, perhaps casting towards her a glance of casual speculation: “What is she really?” they would say, and then put her from their mind and return to their bridge and their billiards and their cricket shop. But he would know, and as she turned from the window he would appreciate the significance of that little movement, that hesitation almost of the shoulders, and she would turn her eyes to him, those sad, disdainful, dove-colored eyes of hers, that invited nothing and offered nothing, but would become for him flooded with sympathy and gentle friendship; there would be no need for words--just that meeting of the eyes across a crowded drawing-room.