It was almost as a guest that, in the country and in his own house, he passed a few weeks with Milly and Christina and entirely as a guest that he dined now and then with them in London.
It was a rather ludicrous situation, but he did not seem depressed or abashed by it. Christina always felt that by some boyish intuition he recognized in her a friendly sympathy, a sympathy which he must certainly see as terribly detached, since it was she who had now fixed definitely Milly's removal from his life, made it permanent and given it a meaning. But it was a sympathy very friendly, even slightly humorous. He would catch her dark eyes sometimes as he sat, a guest at her dinner-table--(he never took Milly in, all the negations of married life were still his)--and in them he saw and responded to an almost affectionate playfulness. He evidently saw the joke and it amused him. Christina often reflected that Dick was a dear, in all his impossibility, and that Milly was not nearly nice enough to him. But Milly was nicer than she had been; the new effectiveness and happiness of her own life made it less of an effort to be so. From her illumined temple she smiled at him, a smile that gained in sweetness and lost its chill. She handed on to him a little of the radiance.
"Since we can't hit it off together, Milly, I must say there is no one you could have chosen for a friend that I could have liked so much as Mrs. Drent," Dick said to his wife one evening in the drawing-room after dinner. They often had an affable chat before the wondering eyes of the world. Milly chatted with great affability. Dick, as Christina so often reminded her, was a dear. No one could have less suggested shackles.
"Now, Dick," she said, smiling, "what do _you_ find to like in Christina?" Even in her new tolerance there lurked touches of the old irrepressible disdain.
Dick, twisting his moustache, contemplated her. "Do you mean that I'm not capable of liking anything or anybody that you do?" he inquired. Milly flushed, though the mildness of her husband's tone, one of purely impersonal interest, suggested no conscious laying of a coal of fire upon her head. It was what she had meant. That Dick should like Christina, Christina Dick, was wholly delightful, but that Dick should seem to like what she liked for the same reasons irked her a little. It was rather as if he had expressed enthusiasms about her favourite Brahms Rhapsody. She rather wanted to show him that any idea he might entertain of a community of tastes was illusory. How could Dick like a Brahms Rhapsody, he whose highest ideals of music were of something sedative after a day's hard riding? And how could Dick really like Christina? If he really did, and for any of her reasons, there must be between them the link, if ever so small a one, of a community of taste--a link that she had never recognized.