As for Chatteris!--Melville shook his head at the cheese, and answered Mrs. Bunting abstractedly.
"She wants to speak to you," said Mrs. Bunting, and Melville with a certain trepidation went upstairs. He went up to the big landing with the seats, to save Adeline the trouble of coming down. She appeared dressed in a black and violet tea gown with much lace, and her dark hair was done with a simple carefulness that suited it. She was pale, and her eyes showed traces of tears, but she had a certain dignity that differed from her usual bearing in being quite unconscious.
She gave him a limp hand and spoke in an exhausted voice.
Melville looked profoundly sympathetic through a pause.
"I feel," she said, "that it isn't coarseness."
"It is some mystery of the imagination that I cannot understand. I should have thought--his career at any rate--would have appealed...." She shook her head and regarded a pot of ferns fixedly for a space.
Melville hesitated to ask the extent of that correspondence, but she left no need for that.
"I had to ask him," she said. "He kept it all from me, and I had to force it from him before he would tell."
"What he felt for her and what he felt for me."
"He has made it clearer. But still even now. No, I don't understand."
She turned slowly and watched Melville's face as she spoke: "You know, Mr. Melville, that this has been an enormous shock to me. I suppose I never really knew him. I suppose I--idealised him. I thought he cared for--our work at any rate.... He _did_ care for our work. He believed in it. Surely he believed in it."
"He is--he is a man with rather a strong imagination."
"It is so strange," she sighed. "It is so inconsistent. It is like a child catching at a new toy. Do you know, Mr. Melville"--she hesitated--"all this has made me feel old. I feel very much older, very much wiser than he is. I cannot help it. I am afraid it is for all women ... to feel that sometimes."
She reflected profoundly. "For _all_ women-- The child, man! I see now just what Sarah Grand meant by that."
She smiled a wan smile. "I feel just as if he had been a naughty child. And I--I worshipped him, Mr. Melville," she said, and her voice quivered.
My cousin coughed and turned about to stare hard out of the window. He was, he perceived, much more shockingly inadequate even than he had expected to be.