“Isn’t it splendid!” she exclaimed at last. They had walked two miles along the crest of the hill, and, smiling in looking round at him, her face, all the sky behind it, all the wind around it, made the word match his own appreciation.
“Splendid,” he assented, thinking of her glance and poise.
Still bending her smile upon him, she said, “You already look different.”
“Different from what?” he asked, amused by her expression, as of a kindly, diagnosing young doctor.
“From last night. From what I felt of you. One might have thought that you had lost the capacity for feeling splendor.”
“Why should you have imagined me so deadened?” He kept his cheerful curiosity.
“I don’t know. I did. There,”--she paused to point,--“do you remember the wind-mill, Gavan? The old miller is dead and his son is the miller now; but the mill looks just as it did when we were little. It makes one think of birds and ships, doesn’t it?--with the beauty that it stays and doesn’t pass. When I was a child--did I ever confide it to you?--my dream was to catch one of the sails as it came down and let it carry me up, up, and right around. What fun it would have been! I suppose that one could have held on.”
“In pretty grim earnest, after the first fun.”
“It would be the sense of coming grimness that would make the desperate thrill of it.”
“Not fond, exactly; the love of risk is a deeper thing--something fundamental in us, I suppose.”
She had walked on, down the hillside, where gorse bushes pulled at her skirts, and he was putting together last night’s impressions with to-day’s, and thinking that if she embodied the instinctive, the life-loving, it wasn’t in the simple, unreflecting forms that the words usually implied. She was simple, but not in the least guileless, and her directness was a choice among recognized complexities. It was no spontaneous child of nature who, on the quieter hillside, where they could talk, talked of India, now, of his life there, the people he had known, many of whom she too knew. He knew that he was being managed, being made to talk of what she wanted to hear, that she was still engaged in penetrating. He was quite willing to be managed, penetrated,--for as far as she could get; he could rely on his own deftness in retreat before too deep a probe, though, should she discover that for him the lessons of life had resulted in an outlook perhaps the antipodes from her own, he guessed that her own would show no wavering. Still, she should run, if possible, no such risk. They were to be friends, good friends: that was, as she had said, not only an accomplished, but a long-accomplished fact; but, even more than in childhood, she would be a friend held at arm’s-length.