"Not being the least glad of you," she said. "I wish I could make people detest me, as Berts detests you. It shows force of character. Oh, Seymour, what jade! It is almost shameless! Isn't it shameless jade I mean? Is any one else coming to lunch?"
"Of course not. I don't dilute you with other people; I prefer Nadine neat. Now let's have the crisis at once. Bring out the lace."
Nadine produced a small parcel and unfolded it.
"Pretty," said he.
Then he looked at it more closely, and tossed it aside. "I hoped it was more like Venetian point than that," he said. "It's all quite wrong: the thread's wrong: the stitch is wrong: it smells wrong. Don't tell me you've bought it."
"No, I shan't tell you," she said.
He took it up again and pondered.
"You got it at Ducane's," he said. "I remember seeing it. Well, take it back to Ducane, and tell him if he sold it as Venetian, that he must give you back your money. My dear, it is no wonder that these dealers get rich, if they can palm off things like that. C'est fini.—Ah, but that is an exquisite aquamarine you are wearing. Those little diamond points round it throw the light into it. How odd people usually are about jewelry. They think great buns of diamonds are sufficient to make an adornment. You might as well send up an ox's hind-leg on the table. What makes the difference is the manner of its presentation. Who is that lady who employs herself in writing passionate love-novels? She says on page one that he was madly in love with her, on page two that she was madly in love with him, on page three that they were madly in love with each other, and then come some asterisks. (How much more artistic, by the way, if they printed the asterisks and left out the rest! Then we should know what it really was like.) You can appreciate nothing until it is framed or cooked: then you can see the details. The poor lady presents us with chunks of meat and informs us that they are amorous men and women. I will write a novel some day, from the detached standpoint, observing and noting. Then I shall go away, abroad. It is only bachelors who can write about love. Do you like my tie?"
Seymour had a trick of putting expression into what he said by means of his hands. He waved and dabbed with them: they fondled each other, and then started apart as if they had quarreled. Sometimes one finger pointed, sometimes another, and they were all beautifully manicured. Antoinette did that, and as she scraped and filed and polished, he talked his admirable French to her, and asked after the old home in Normandy, where she learned to make wonderful soup out of carrots and turnips and shin-bones of beef. At the moment she came in to announce the readiness of lunch.
"Oh, is it lunch already?" said Nadine. "Can't we have it after half an hour? I should like to see the jade."
"Oh, quite impossible," said he. "She has taken such pains. It would distress her. For me, I should prefer not to lunch yet, but she is the artist now. They are fragile things, Nadine, eggs in spinach. You must come at once."
"How greedy you are," she said.
"For you that is a foolish thing to say. I am simply thinking of Antoinette's pride. It is as if I blew a soap-bubble, all iridescent, and you said you would come to look at it in ten minutes. You shall tell me news: if you talk you can always eat. What has happened in Philistia?"
Nadine frowned.
"You think of us all as Philistines," she said, "because we like simple pleasures, and because we are enthusiastic."
"Ah, you mistake!" he said. "You couple two reasons which have nothing to do with each other. To be enthusiastic is the best possible condition, but you must be enthusiastic over what is worth enthusiasm. Is it so lovely really, that Aunt Dodo has settled to marry the Ripper? Surely that is a rechauffée. You wrote me the silliest letter about it. Of course it does not matter at all. Much more important is that you look perfectly exquisite. Antoinette, the spinach is sans pareil: give me some more spinach. But it is slightly bourgeois in Jack the R. to have been faithful for so many years. It shows want of imagination, also I think a want of vitality, only to care for one woman."
"That is one more than you ever cared for," remarked Nadine.
"I know. I said it was bourgeois to care for one. There is a difference. It is also like a troubadour. I am not in the least like a troubadour. But I think I shall get married soon. It gives one more liberty: people don't feel curious about one any more. English people are so odd: they think you must lead a double life, and if you don't lead the ordinary double life with a wife, they think you lead it with somebody else and they get curious. I am not in the least curious about other people: they can lead as many lives as a piano has strings for all I care, and thump all the strings together, or play delicate arpeggios on them. Nadine, that hat-pin of yours is simply too divine. I will eat it pin and all if it is not Fabergé."
Nadine laughed.
"I can't imagine you married," she said. "You would make a very odd husband."
"I would make a very odd anything," said he. "I don't find any recognized niche that really fits me, whereas almost everybody has some sort of niche. Indeed in the course of hundreds of years the niches, that is the manners of life, have been evolved to suit the sorts of types which nature produces. They live in rows and respect each other. But why it should be considered respectable to marry and have hosts of horrible children I cannot imagine. But it is, and I bow to the united strength of middle-class opinion. But neither you nor I are really made to live in rows. We are Bedouins by nature, and like to see a different sunrise every day. There shall be another tent for Antoinette."
That admirable lady was just bringing them their coffee, and he spoke to her in French.
"Antoinette, we start for the desert of Sahara to-morrow," he said. "We shall live in tents."
Antoinette's plump face wrinkled itself up into enchanted smiles.
"Bien, m'sieur," she said. "A quelle heure?"
Nadine crunched up her coffee-sugar between her white teeth.
"You are as little fitted to cross the desert of Sahara as any one I ever met," she said.
"I should not cross it: I should—"
"You would be miserable without your jade or your brocade and the sand would get into your hair, and you would have no bath," she said. "But every one who thinks has a Bedouin mind: it always wants me to go on and find new horizons and get nearer to blue mountains."
"The matter with you is that you want and you don't know what you want," said he.
Nadine nodded at him. Sometimes when she was with him she felt as if she was talking to a shrewd middle-aged man, sometimes to a rather affected girl. Then occasionally, and this had been in evidence to-day, she felt as if she was talking to some curious mixture of the two, who had a girl's intuition and a man's judgment. Fond as she was of the friends whom she had so easily gathered round her, gleeful as was the nonsense they talked, serious as was her study of Plato, she felt sometimes that all those sunny hours concerned but the surface of her, that, as she had said before, the individual, the character that sat behind was not really concerned in them. And Seymour, when he made mixture of his two types, had the effect of making her very conscious of the character that sat behind. He had described it just now in a sentence: it wanted it knew not what.
"And I want it so frightfully," she said. "It is a pity I don't know what it is. Because then I should probably get it. One gets what one wants if one wants enough."
"A
