“You can turn up another light, Murgatroyd,” she said, instantly recovering herself sufficiently to speak in a natural voice.
And she walked back down the room to Sir Seymour, carrying with her a little silver vase full of very large white carnations.
“These are the flowers I was speaking about,” she said to him. “Have you ever seen any so large before? They look almost unnatural, don’t they?”
“No; but I don’t understand what has happened.”
“_I_ have happened, I and my miserable disgusting mind and brain and temperament. That’s all!”
“Tell me--have you ever been severe on me in your mind? You don’t really know me. Nobody does or ever will. But you know me what is called well. Have you ever been mentally severe, hard on me?”
She felt suddenly rather cold, and she knew that his answer had surprised her. She had certainly expected him to say, “Never, my dear!”
And, while saying it, she was scarcely conscious that she was telling a lie.
“But you must not think that such thoughts about you ever make the least difference in my feeling for you,” he said. “That has never changed, never could change.”
“Oh--I don’t know!” she said in a rather hard voice. “Everything can change, I think.”
“I suppose you have often disapproved of things I have done?”
“Tell me, if--if things had been different, and you and I had come together, what would you have done if you had disapproved of my conduct?”
“What is the good of entering upon that?”
“I hope I should find the way to hold a woman who was mine,” he said, with a sort of decisive calmness, but with a great temperateness.
“But if you married an ungovernable creature?”
“I doubt if anybody is absolutely ungovernable. In the army I have had to deal with some stiff propositions; but there is always a way.”
“Is there? But in the army you deal with men. And we are so utterly different.”
“Could he find the way now?” she thought. “Shall I do it? Shall I risk it?”
“Why do you look at me like that?” he asked; “almost as if you were looking at me for the first time and were trying to make me out?”
She did not answer, but gave him his tea and sat back on her sofa.
“You sent for me for some special reason. You had some plan, some project in your mind,” he continued. “I did not realize that at first, but now I am sure of it. You want me to help you in some way, don’t you?”