Томас Харди (Гарди)
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Chapter XVII
‘Her welcome, spoke in faltering phrase.’
‘There is Henry Knight, I declare!’ said Mrs. Swancourt one day.
They were gazing from the jutting angle of a wild enclosure not far from The Crags, which almost overhung the valley already described as leading up from the sea and little port of Castle Boterel. The stony escarpment upon which they stood had the contour of a man’s face, and it was covered with furze as with a beard. People in the field above were preserved from an accidental roll down these prominences and hollows by a hedge on the very crest, which was doing that kindly service for Elfride and her mother now.
Scrambling higher into the hedge and stretching her neck further over the furze, Elfride beheld the individual signified. He was walking leisurely along the little green path at the bottom, beside the stream, a satchel slung upon his left hip, a stout walking-stick in his hand, and a brown-holland sun-hat upon his head. The satchel was worn and old, and the outer polished surface of the leather was cracked and peeling off.
Knight having arrived over the hills to Castle Boterel upon the top of a crazy omnibus, preferred to walk the remaining two miles up the valley, leaving his luggage to be brought on.
Behind him wandered, helter-skelter, a boy of whom Knight had briefly inquired the way to Endelstow; and by that natural law of physics which causes lesser bodies to gravitate towards the greater, this boy had kept near to Knight, and trotted like a little dog close at his heels, whistling as he went, with his eyes fixed upon Knight’s boots as they rose and fell.
When they had reached a point precisely opposite that in which Mrs. and Miss Swancourt lay in ambush, Knight stopped and turned round.
‘Look here, my boy,’ he said.
The boy parted his lips, opened his eyes, and answered nothing.
‘Here’s sixpence for you, on condition that you don’t again come within twenty yards of my heels, all the way up the valley.’
The boy, who apparently had not known he had been looking at Knight’s heels at all, took the sixpence mechanically, and Knight went on again, wrapt in meditation.
‘A nice voice,’ Elfride thought; ‘but what a singular temper!’
‘Now we must get indoors before he ascends the slope,’ said Mrs. Swancourt softly. And they went across by a short cut over a stile, entering the lawn by a side door, and so on to the house.
Mr. Swancourt had gone into the village with the curate, and Elfride felt too nervous to await their visitor’s arrival in the drawing-room with Mrs. Swancourt. So that when the elder lady entered, Elfride made some pretence of perceiving a new variety of crimson geranium, and lingered behind among the flower beds.
There was nothing gained by this, after all, she thought; and a few minutes after boldly came into the house by the glass side-door. She walked along the corridor, and entered the drawing-room. Nobody was there.
A window at the angle of the room opened directly into an octagonal conservatory, enclosing the corner of the building. From the conservatory came voices in conversation – Mrs. Swancourt’s and the stranger’s.
She had expected him to talk brilliantly. To her surprise he was asking questions in quite a learner’s manner, on subjects connected with the flowers and shrubs that she had known for years. When after the lapse of a few minutes he spoke at some length, she considered there was a hard square decisiveness in the shape of his sentences, as if, unlike her own and Stephen’s, they were not there and then newly constructed, but were drawn forth from a large store ready-made. They were now approaching the window to come in again.
‘That is a flesh-coloured variety,’ said Mrs. Swancourt. ‘But oleanders, though they are such bulky shrubs, are so very easily wounded as to be unprunable – giants with the sensitiveness of young ladies. Oh, here is Elfride!’
Elfride looked as guilty and crestfallen as Lady Teazle at the dropping of the screen. Mrs. Swancourt presented him half comically, and Knight in a minute or two placed himself beside the young lady.
A complexity of instincts checked Elfride’s conventional smiles of complaisance and hospitality; and, to make her still less comfortable, Mrs. Swancourt immediately afterwards left them together to seek her husband. Mr. Knight, however, did not seem at all incommoded by his feelings, and he said with light easefulness:
‘So, Miss Swancourt, I have met you at last. You escaped me by a few minutes only when we were in London.’
‘Yes. I found that you had seen Mrs. Swancourt.’
‘And now reviewer and reviewed are face to face,’ he added unconcernedly.
‘Yes: though the fact of your being a relation of Mrs. Swancourt’s takes off the edge of it. It was strange that you should be one of her family all the time.’ Elfride began to recover herself now, and to look into Knight’s face. ‘I was merely anxious to let you know my REAL meaning in writing the book – extremely anxious.’
‘I can quite understand the wish; and I was gratified that my remarks should have reached home. They very seldom do, I am afraid.’
Elfride drew herself in. Here he was, sticking to his opinions as firmly as if friendship and politeness did not in the least require an immediate renunciation of them.
‘You made me very uneasy and sorry by writing such things!’ she murmured, suddenly dropping the mere cacueterie of a fashionable first introduction, and speaking with some of the dudgeon of a child towards a severe schoolmaster.
‘That is rather the object of honest critics in such a case. Not to cause unnecessary sorrow, but: “To make you sorry after a proper manner, that ye may receive damage by us in nothing,” as a powerful pen once wrote to the Gentiles. Are you going to write another romance?’
‘Write another?’ she said. ‘That somebody may pen a condemnation and “nail’t wi’ Scripture” again, as you do now, Mr. Knight?’
‘You may do better next time,’ he said placidly: ‘I think you will. But I would advise you to confine yourself to domestic scenes.’
‘Thank you. But never again!’
‘Well, you may be right. That a young woman has taken to writing is not by any means the best thing to hear about her.’
‘What is the best?’
‘I prefer not to say.’
‘Do you know? Then, do tell me, please.’
‘Well’ – (Knight was evidently changing his meaning) – ‘I suppose to hear that she has married.’
Elfride hesitated. ‘And what when she has been married?’ she said at last, partly in order to withdraw her own person from the argument.
‘Then to hear no more about her. It is as Smeaton said of his lighthouse: her greatest real praise, when the novelty of her inauguration has worn off, is that nothing happens to keep the talk of her alive.’
‘Yes, I see,’ said Elfride softly and thoughtfully. ‘But of course it is different quite with men. Why don’t you write novels, Mr. Knight?’
‘Because I couldn’t write one that would interest anybody.’
‘Why?’
‘For several reasons. It requires a judicious omission of your real thoughts to make a novel popular, for one thing.’
‘Is that really necessary? Well, I am sure you could learn to do that with practice,’ said Elfride with an ex-cathedra air, as became a person who spoke from experience in the art. ‘You would make a great name for certain,’ she continued.
‘So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to remain in obscurity.’
‘Tell me seriously – apart from the subject – why don’t you write a volume instead of loose articles?’ she insisted.
‘Since you are pleased to make me talk of myself, I will tell you seriously,’ said Knight, not less amused at this catechism by his young friend than he was interested in her appearance. ‘As I have implied, I have not the wish. And if I had the wish, I could not now concentrate sufficiently. We all have only our one cruse of energy given us to make the best of. And where that energy has been leaked away week by week, quarter by quarter, as mine has for the last nine or ten years, there is not enough dammed back behind the mill at any given period to supply the force a complete book on any subject requires. Then there is the self-confidence and waiting power. Where quick results have grown customary, they are fatal to a lively faith in the future.’
‘Yes, I comprehend; and so you choose to write in fragments?’
‘No, I don’t choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from a whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the constraint of accident merely. Not that I object to the accident.’
‘Why don’t you object – I mean, why do you feel so quiet about things?’ Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her intense curiosity to see what the inside of literary Mr. Knight was like, kept her going on.
Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of this trait in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent from habit, may be recalled by all of us. When they find a listener who can by no possibility make use of them, rival them, or condemn them, reserved and even suspicious men of the world become frank, keenly enjoying the inner side of their frankness.
‘Why I don’t mind the accidental constraint,’ he replied, ‘is because, in making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is often better than absolute freedom.’
‘I see – that is, I should if I quite understood what all those generalities mean.’
‘Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one’s work, which no length of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix itself on the work itself, and make the best of it.’
‘Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that tongue,’ she said mischievously. ‘And I suppose where no limit exists, as in the case of a rich man with a wide taste who wants to do something, it will be better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.’
‘Yes,’ he said meditatively. ‘I can go as far as that.’
‘Well,’ resumed Elfride, ‘I think it better for a man’s nature if he does nothing in particular.’
‘There is such a case as being obliged to.’
‘Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any other reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought many times lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing now, and of a piece with the days of your life, is preferable to an anticipated heap far away in the future, and none now.’
‘Why, that’s the very thing I said just now as being the principle of all ephemeral doers like myself.’
‘Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,’ she said with some confusion. ‘Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not trying to be famous.’ And she added, with the quickness of conviction characteristic of her mind: ‘There is much littleness in trying to be great. A man must think a good deal of himself, and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he tries at all.’
‘But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man’s thinking a good deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong, and too soon then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do with merit, and his motive may be his very humility.’
This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner did she agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took the other side. ‘Ah,’ she thought inwardly, ‘I shall have nothing to do with a man of this kind, though he is our visitor.’
‘I think you will find,’ resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation more for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject than for engaging her attention, ‘that in actual life it is merely a matter of instinct with men – this trying to push on. They awake to a recognition that they have, without premeditation, begun to try a little, and they say to themselves, “Since I have tried thus much, I will try a little more.” They go on because they have begun.’
Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words at this moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of seizing any point in the remarks of an interlocutor which interested her, and dwelling upon it, and thinking thoughts of her own thereupon, totally oblivious of all that he might say in continuation. On such occasions she artlessly surveyed the person speaking; and then there was a time for a painter. Her eyes seemed to look at you, and past you, as you were then, into your future; and past your future into your eternity – not reading it, but gazing in an unused, unconscious way – her mind still clinging to its original thought.
This is how she was looking at Knight.
Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was painfully confused.
‘What were you so intent upon in me?’ he inquired.
‘As far as I was thinking of you at all, I was thinking how clever you are,’ she said, with a want of premeditation that was startling in its honesty and simplicity.
Feeling restless now that she had so unwittingly spoken, she arose and stepped to the window, having heard the voices of her father and Mrs. Swancourt coming up below the terrace. ‘Here they are,’ she said, going out. Knight walked out upon the lawn behind her. She stood upon the edge of the terrace, close to the stone balustrade, and looked towards the sun, hanging over a glade just now fair as Tempe’s vale, up which her father was walking.
Knight could not help looking at her. The sun was within ten degrees of the horizon, and its warm light flooded her face and heightened the bright rose colour of her cheeks to a vermilion red, their moderate pink hue being only seen in its natural tone where the cheek curved round into shadow. The ends of her hanging hair softly dragged themselves backwards and forwards upon her shoulder as each faint breeze thrust against or relinquished it. Fringes and ribbons of her dress, moved by the same breeze, licked like tongues upon the parts around them, and fluttering forward from shady folds caught likewise their share of the lustrous orange glow.
Mr. Swancourt shouted out a welcome to Knight from a distance of about thirty yards, and after a few preliminary words proceeded to a conversation of deep earnestness on Knight’s fine old family name, and theories as to lineage and intermarriage connected therewith. Knight’s portmanteau having in the meantime arrived, they soon retired to prepare for dinner, which had been postponed two hours later than the usual time of that meal.
An arrival was an event in the life of Elfride, now that they were again in the country, and that of Knight necessarily an engrossing one. And that evening she went to bed for the first time without thinking of Stephen at all.
Chapter XVIII
‘He heard her musical pants.’
The old tower of West Endelstow Church had reached the last weeks of its existence. It was to be replaced by a new one from the designs of Mr. Hewby, the architect who had sent down Stephen. Planks and poles had arrived in the churchyard, iron bars had been thrust into the venerable crack extending down the belfry wall to the foundation, the bells had been taken down, the owls had forsaken this home of their forefathers, and six iconoclasts in white fustian, to whom a cracked edifice was a species of Mumbo Jumbo, had taken lodgings in the village previous to beginning the actual removal of the stones.
This was the day after Knight’s arrival. To enjoy for the last time the prospect seaward from the summit, the vicar, Mrs. Swancourt, Knight, and Elfride, all ascended the winding turret – Mr. Swancourt stepping forward with many loud breaths, his wife struggling along silently, but suffering none the less. They had hardly reached the top when a large lurid cloud, palpably a reservoir of rain, thunder, and lightning, was seen to be advancing overhead from the north.
The two cautious elders suggested an immediate return, and proceeded to put it in practice as regarded themselves.
‘Dear me, I wish I had not come up,’ exclaimed Mrs. Swancourt.
‘We shall be slower than you two in going down,’ the vicar said over his shoulder, ‘and so, don’t you start till we are nearly at the bottom, or you will run over us and break our necks somewhere in the darkness of the turret.’
Accordingly Elfride and Knight waited on the leads till the staircase should be clear. Knight was not in a talkative mood that morning. Elfride was rather wilful, by reason of his inattention, which she privately set down to his thinking her not worth talking to. Whilst Knight stood watching the rise of the cloud, she sauntered to the other side of the tower, and there remembered a giddy feat she had performed the year before. It was to walk round upon the parapet of the tower – which was quite without battlement or pinnacle, and presented a smooth flat surface about two feet wide, forming a pathway on all the four sides. Without reflecting in the least upon what she was doing she now stepped upon the parapet in the old way, and began walking along.
‘We are down, cousin Henry,’ cried Mrs. Swancourt up the turret. ‘Follow us when you like.’
Knight turned and saw Elfride beginning her elevated promenade. His face flushed with mingled concern and anger at her rashness.
‘I certainly gave you credit for more common sense,’ he said.
She reddened a little and walked on.
‘Miss Swancourt, I insist upon your coming down,’ he exclaimed.
‘I will in a minute. I am safe enough. I have done it often.’
At that moment, by reason of a slight perturbation his words had caused in her, Elfride’s foot caught itself in a little tuft of grass growing in a joint of the stone-work, and she almost lost her balance. Knight sprang forward with a face of horror. By what seemed the special interposition of a considerate Providence she tottered to the inner edge of the parapet instead of to the outer, and reeled over upon the lead roof two or three feet below the wall.
Knight seized her as in a vice, and he said, panting, ‘That ever I should have met a woman fool enough to do a thing of that kind! Good God, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!’
The close proximity of the Shadow of Death had made her sick and pale as a corpse before he spoke. Already lowered to that state, his words completely over-powered her, and she swooned away as he held her.
Elfride’s eyes were not closed for more than forty seconds. She opened them, and remembered the position instantly. His face had altered its expression from stern anger to pity. But his severe remarks had rather frightened her, and she struggled to be free.
‘If you can stand, of course you may,’ he said, and loosened his arms. ‘I hardly know whether most to laugh at your freak or to chide you for its folly.’
She immediately sank upon the lead-work. Knight lifted her again. ‘Are you hurt?’ he said.
She murmured an incoherent expression, and tried to smile; saying, with a fitful aversion of her face, ‘I am only frightened. Put me down, do put me down!’
‘But you can’t walk,’ said Knight.
‘You don’t know that; how can you? I am only frightened, I tell you,’ she answered petulantly, and raised her hand to her forehead. Knight then saw that she was bleeding from a severe cut in her wrist, apparently where it had descended upon a salient corner of the lead-work. Elfride, too, seemed to perceive and feel this now for the first time, and for a minute nearly lost consciousness again. Knight rapidly bound his handkerchief round the place, and to add to the complication, the thundercloud he had been watching began to shed some heavy drops of rain. Knight looked up and saw the vicar striding towards the house, and Mrs. Swancourt waddling beside him like a hard-driven duck.
‘As you are so faint, it will be much better to let me carry you down,’ said Knight; ‘or at any rate inside out of the rain.’ But her objection to be lifted made it impossible for him to support her for more than five steps.
‘This is folly, great folly,’ he exclaimed, setting her down.
‘Indeed!’ she murmured, with tears in her eyes. ‘I say I will not be carried, and you say this is folly!’
‘So it is.’
‘No, it isn’t!’
‘It is folly, I think. At any rate, the origin of it all is.’
‘I don’t agree to it. And you needn’t get so angry with me; I am not worth it.’
‘Indeed you are. You are worth the enmity of princes, as was said of such another. Now, then, will you clasp your hands behind my neck, that I may carry you down without hurting you?’
‘No, no.’
‘You had better, or I shall foreclose.’
‘What’s that!’
‘Deprive you of your chance.’
Elfride gave a little toss.
‘Now, don’t writhe so when I attempt to carry you.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘Then submit quietly.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t care,’ she murmured in languid tones and with closed eyes.
He took her into his arms, entered the turret, and with slow and cautious steps descended round and round. Then, with the gentleness of a nursing mother, he attended to the cut on her arm. During his progress through the operations of wiping it and binding it up anew, her face changed its aspect from pained indifference to something like bashful interest, interspersed with small tremors and shudders of a trifling kind.
In the centre of each pale cheek a small red spot the size of a wafer had now made its appearance, and continued to grow larger. Elfride momentarily expected a recurrence to the lecture on her foolishness, but Knight said no more than this —
‘Promise me NEVER to walk on that parapet again.’
‘It will be pulled down soon: so I do.’ In a few minutes she continued in a lower tone, and seriously, ‘You are familiar of course, as everybody is, with those strange sensations we sometimes have, that our life for the moment exists in duplicate.’
‘That we have lived through that moment before?’
‘Or shall again. Well, I felt on the tower that something similar to that scene is again to be common to us both.’
‘God forbid!’ said Knight. ‘Promise me that you will never again walk on any such place on any consideration.’
‘I do.’
‘That such a thing has not been before, we know. That it shall not be again, you vow. Therefore think no more of such a foolish fancy.’
There had fallen a great deal of rain, but unaccompanied by lightning. A few minutes longer, and the storm had ceased.
‘Now, take my arm, please.’
‘Oh no, it is not necessary.’ This relapse into wilfulness was because he had again connected the epithet foolish with her.
‘Nonsense: it is quite necessary; it will rain again directly, and you are not half recovered.’ And without more ado Knight took her hand, drew it under his arm, and held it there so firmly that she could not have removed it without a struggle. Feeling like a colt in a halter for the first time, at thus being led along, yet afraid to be angry, it was to her great relief that she saw the carriage coming round the corner to fetch them.
Her fall upon the roof was necessarily explained to some extent upon their entering the house; but both forbore to mention a word of what she had been doing to cause such an accident. During the remainder of the afternoon Elfride was invisible; but at dinner-time she appeared as bright as ever.
In the drawing-room, after having been exclusively engaged with Mr. and Mrs. Swancourt through the intervening hour, Knight again found himself thrown with Elfride. She had been looking over a chess problem in one of the illustrated periodicals.
‘You like chess, Miss Swancourt?’
‘Yes. It is my favourite scientific game; indeed, excludes every other. Do you play?’
‘I have played; though not lately.’
‘Challenge him, Elfride,’ said the vicar heartily. ‘She plays very well for a lady, Mr. Knight.’
‘Shall we play?’ asked Elfride tentatively.
‘Oh, certainly. I shall be delighted.’
The game began. Mr. Swancourt had forgotten a similar performance with Stephen Smith the year before. Elfride had not; but she had begun to take for her maxim the undoubted truth that the necessity of continuing faithful to Stephen, without suspicion, dictated a fickle behaviour almost as imperatively as fickleness itself; a fact, however, which would give a startling advantage to the latter quality should it ever appear.
Knight, by one of those inexcusable oversights which will sometimes afflict the best of players, placed his rook in the arms of one of her pawns. It was her first advantage. She looked triumphant – even ruthless.
‘By George! what was I thinking of?’ said Knight quietly; and then dismissed all concern at his accident.
‘Club laws we’ll have, won’t we, Mr. Knight?’ said Elfride suasively.
‘Oh yes, certainly,’ said Mr. Knight, a thought, however, just occurring to his mind, that he had two or three times allowed her to replace a man on her religiously assuring him that such a move was an absolute blunder.
She immediately took up the unfortunate rook and the contest proceeded, Elfride having now rather the better of the game. Then he won the exchange, regained his position, and began to press her hard. Elfride grew flurried, and placed her queen on his remaining rook’s file.
‘There – how stupid! Upon my word, I did not see your rook. Of course nobody but a fool would have put a queen there knowingly!’
She spoke excitedly, half expecting her antagonist to give her back the move.
‘Nobody, of course,’ said Knight serenely, and stretched out his hand towards his royal victim.
‘It is not very pleasant to have it taken advantage of, then,’ she said with some vexation.
‘Club laws, I think you said?’ returned Knight blandly, and mercilessly appropriating the queen.
She was on the brink of pouting, but was ashamed to show it; tears almost stood in her eyes. She had been trying so hard – so very hard – thinking and thinking till her brain was in a whirl; and it seemed so heartless of him to treat her so, after all.
‘I think it is – ’ she began.
‘What?’
– ‘Unkind to take advantage of a pure mistake I make in that way.’
‘I lost my rook by even a purer mistake,’ said the enemy in an inexorable tone, without lifting his eyes.
‘Yes, but – ’ However, as his logic was absolutely unanswerable, she merely registered a protest. ‘I cannot endure those cold-blooded ways of clubs and professional players, like Staunton and Morphy. Just as if it really mattered whether you have raised your fingers from a man or no!’
Knight smiled as pitilessly as before, and they went on in silence.
‘Checkmate,’ said Knight.
‘Another game,’ said Elfride peremptorily, and looking very warm.
‘With all my heart,’ said Knight.
‘Checkmate,’ said Knight again at the end of forty minutes.
‘Another game,’ she returned resolutely.
‘I’ll give you the odds of a bishop,’ Knight said to her kindly.
‘No, thank you,’ Elfride replied in a tone intended for courteous indifference; but, as a fact, very cavalier indeed.
‘Checkmate,’ said her opponent without the least emotion.
Oh, the difference between Elfride’s condition of mind now, and when she purposely made blunders that Stephen Smith might win!
It was bedtime. Her mind as distracted as if it would throb itself out of her head, she went off to her chamber, full of mortification at being beaten time after time when she herself was the aggressor. Having for two or three years enjoyed the reputation throughout the globe of her father’s brain – which almost constituted her entire world – of being an excellent player, this fiasco was intolerable; for unfortunately the person most dogged in the belief in a false reputation is always that one, the possessor, who has the best means of knowing that it is not true.
In bed no sleep came to soothe her; that gentle thing being the very middle-of-summer friend in this respect of flying away at the merest troublous cloud. After lying awake till two o’clock an idea seemed to strike her. She softly arose, got a light, and fetched a Chess Praxis from the library. Returning and sitting up in bed, she diligently studied the volume till the clock struck five, and her eyelids felt thick and heavy. She then extinguished the light and lay down again.
‘You look pale, Elfride,’ said Mrs. Swancourt the next morning at breakfast. ‘Isn’t she, cousin Harry?’
A young girl who is scarcely ill at all can hardly help becoming so when regarded as such by all eyes turning upon her at the table in obedience to some remark. Everybody looked at Elfride. She certainly was pale.
‘Am I pale?’ she said with a faint smile. ‘I did not sleep much. I could not get rid of armies of bishops and knights, try how I would.’
‘Chess is a bad thing just before bedtime; especially for excitable people like yourself, dear. Don’t ever play late again.’
‘I’ll play early instead. Cousin Knight,’ she said in imitation of Mrs. Swancourt, ‘will you oblige me in something?’
‘Even to half my kingdom.’
‘Well, it is to play one game more.’
‘When?’
‘Now, instantly; the moment we have breakfasted.’
‘Nonsense, Elfride,’ said her father. ‘Making yourself a slave to the game like that.’
‘But I want to, papa! Honestly, I am restless at having been so ignominiously overcome. And Mr. Knight doesn’t mind. So what harm can there be?’
‘Let us play, by all means, if you wish it,’ said Knight.
So, when breakfast was over, the combatants withdrew to the quiet of the library, and the door was closed. Elfride seemed to have an idea that her conduct was rather ill-regulated and startlingly free from conventional restraint. And worse, she fancied upon Knight’s face a slightly amused look at her proceedings.
‘You think me foolish, I suppose,’ she said recklessly; ‘but I want to do my very best just once, and see whether I can overcome you.’
‘Certainly: nothing more natural. Though I am afraid it is not the plan adopted by women of the world after a defeat.’
‘Why, pray?’
‘Because they know that as good as overcoming is skill in effacing recollection of being overcome, and turn their attention to that entirely.’
‘I am wrong again, of course.’
‘Perhaps your wrong is more pleasing than their right.’
‘I don’t quite know whether you mean that, or whether you are laughing at me,’ she said, looking doubtingly at him, yet inclining to accept the more flattering interpretation. ‘I am almost sure you think it vanity in me to think I am a match for you. Well, if you do, I say that vanity is no crime in such a case.’
