Lettie?"
"I don't feel concerned enough," replied the other calmly.
"Did you ever carry a boiled pudding Georgy?" asked Alice with innocent interest, punching me slyly.
"Me!—why?—what makes you ask?" he replied, quite at a loss.
"Oh, I only wondered if your people needed any indigestion mixture—pa mixes it—1/1½ a bottle."
"I don't see——" he began.
"Ta—ta, old boy, I'll give you time to think about it. Good-night, Lettie. Absence makes the heart grow fonder—Georgy—of someone else. Farewell. Come along, Sybil love, the moon is shining—Good-night all, good-night!"
I escorted her home, while they continued to look at the pictures. He was a romanticist. He liked Copley, Fielding, Cattermole and Birket Foster; he could see nothing whatsoever in Girtin or David Cox. They fell out decidedly over George Clausen.
"But," said Lettie, "he is a real realist, he makes common things beautiful, he sees the mystery and magnificence that envelops us even when we work menially. I do know and I can speak. If I hoed in the fields beside you——" This was a very new idea for him, almost a shock to his imagination, and she talked unheeded. The picture under discussion was a water-colour—"Hoeing" by Clausen.
"You'd be just that colour in the sunset," she said, thus bringing him back to the subject, "and if you looked at the ground you'd find there was a sense of warm gold fire in it, and once you'd perceived the colour, it would strengthen till you'd see nothing else. You are blind; you are only half-born; you are gross with good living and heavy sleeping. You are a piano which will only play a dozen common notes. Sunset is nothing to you—it merely happens anywhere. Oh, but you make me feel as if I'd like to make you suffer. If you'd ever been sick; if you'd ever been born into a home where there was something oppressed you, and you couldn't understand; if ever you'd believed, or even doubted, you might have been a man by now. You never grow up, like bulbs which spend all summer getting fat and fleshy, but never wakening the germ of a flower. As for me, the flower is born in me, but it wants bringing forth. Things don't flower if they're overfed. You have to suffer before you blossom in this life. When death is just touching a plant, it forces it into a passion of flowering. You wonder how I have touched death. You don't know. There's always a sense of death in this home. I believe my mother hated my father before I was born. That was death in her veins for me before I was born. It makes a difference——"
As he sat listening, his eyes grew wide and his lips were parted, like a child who feels the tale but does not understand the words. She, looking away from herself at last, saw him, began to laugh gently, and patted his hand saying:
"Oh! my dear heart, are you bewildered? How amiable of you to listen to me—there isn't any meaning in it all—there isn't really!"
"But," said he, "why do you say it?"
"Oh, the question!" she laughed. "Let us go back to our muttons, we're gazing at each other like two dazed images."
They turned on, chatting casually, till George suddenly exclaimed, "There!"
It was Maurice Griffinhagen's "Idyll."
"What of it?" she asked, gradually flushing. She remembered her own enthusiasm over the picture.
"Wouldn't it be fine?" he exclaimed, looking at her with glowing eyes, his teeth showing white in a smile that was not amusement.
"What?" she asked, dropping her head in confusion.
"That—a girl like that—half afraid—and passion!" He lit up curiously.
"She may well be half afraid, when the barbarian comes out in his glory, skins and all."
"But don't you like it?" he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, saying, "Make love to the next girl you meet, and by the time the poppies redden the field, she'll hang in your arms. She'll have need to be more than half afraid, won't she?"
She played with the leaves of the book, and did not look at him.
"But," he faltered, his eyes glowing, "it would be—rather——"
"Don't, sweet lad, don't!" she cried laughing.
"But I shouldn't—" he insisted, "I don't know whether I should like any girl I know to——"
"Precious Sir Galahad," she said in a mock caressing voice, and stroking his cheek with her finger, "You ought to have been a monk—a martyr, a Carthusian."
He laughed, taking no notice. He was breathlessly quivering under the new sensation of heavy, unappeased fire in his breast, and in the muscles of his arms. He glanced at her bosom and shivered.
"Are you studying just how to play the part?" she asked.
"No—but——" he tried to look at her, but failed. He shrank, laughing, and dropped his head.
"What?" she asked with vibrant curiosity.
Having become a few degrees calmer, he looked up at her now, his eyes wide and vivid with a declaration that made her shrink back as if flame had leaped towards her face. She bent down her head and picked at her dress.
"Didn't you know the picture before?" she said, in a low, toneless voice.
He shut his eyes and shrank with shame.
"No, I've never seen it before," he said.
"I'm surprised," she said. "It is a very common one."
"Is it?" he answered, and this make-belief conversation fell. She looked up, and found his eyes. They gazed at each other for a moment before they hid their faces again. It was a torture to each of them to look thus nakedly at the other, a dazzled, shrinking pain that they forced themselves to undergo for a moment, that they might the moment after tremble with a fierce sensation that filled their veins with fluid, fiery electricity. She sought almost in panic, for something to say.
"I believe it's in Liverpool, the picture," she contrived to say.
He dared not kill this conversation, he was too self-conscious. He forced himself to reply, "I didn't know there was a gallery in Liverpool."
"Oh, yes, a very good one," she said.
Their eyes met in the briefest flash of a glance, then both turned their faces aside. Thus averted, one from the other, they made talk. At last she rose, gathered the books together, and carried them off. At the door she turned. She must steal another keen moment: "Are you admiring my strength?" she asked. Her pose was fine. With her head thrown back, the roundness of her throat ran finely down to the bosom which swelled above the pile of books held by her straight arms. He looked at her. Their lips smiled curiously. She put back her throat as if she were drinking. They felt the blood beating madly in their necks. Then, suddenly breaking into a slight trembling, she turned round and left the room.
While she was out, he sat twisting his moustache. She came back along the hall talking madly to herself in French. Having been much impressed by Sarah Bernhardt's "Dame aux Camelias" and "Adrienne Lecouvreur," Lettie had caught something of the weird tone of this great actress, and her raillery and mockery came out in little wild waves. She laughed at him, and at herself,
