Imogene kept away from the fire, sitting down, in the provisional fashion of women, with her things on; but she unbuttoned her pelisse and flung it open. Effie had gone to her room.
“Did you have a pleasant drive?” asked Mrs. Bowen.
“Very,” said the girl.
“Mr. Morton brought you these roses,” continued Mrs. Bowen.
“Oh,” said Imogene, with a cold glance at them.
“The Flemmings have asked us to a party Thursday. There is to be dancing.”
“The Flemmings?”
“Yes.” As if she now saw reason to do so, Mrs. Bowen laid the book face downward in her lap. She yawned a little, with her hand on her mouth. “Did you meet anyone you knew?”
“Yes; Mr. Colville.” Mrs. Bowen cut her yawn in half. “We got out to walk in the Cascine, and we saw him coming in at the gate. He came up and asked if he might walk with us.”
“Did you have a pleasant walk?” asked Mrs. Bowen, a breath more chillily than she had asked if they had a pleasant drive.
“Yes, pleasant enough. And then we came back and went down the river bank, and he skipped stones, and we took him to his hotel.”
“Was there anybody you knew in the Cascine?”
“Oh no; the place was a howling wilderness. I never saw it so deserted,” said the girl impatiently. “It was terribly hot walking. I thought I should burn up.”
Mrs. Bowen did not answer anything; she let the book lie in her lap.
“What an odd person Mr. Colville is!” said Imogene, after a moment. “Don’t you think he’s very different from other gentlemen?”
“Why?”
“Oh, he has such a peculiar way of talking.”
“What peculiar way?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Plenty of the young men I see talk cynically, and I do sometimes myself—desperately, don’t you know. But then I know very well we don’t mean anything by it.”
“And do you think Mr. Colville does? Do you think he talks cynically?”
Imogene leaned back in her chair and reflected. “No,” she returned slowly, “I can’t say that he does. But he talks lightly, with a kind of touch and go that makes you feel that he has exhausted all feeling. He doesn’t parade it at all. But you hear between the words, don’t you know, just as you read between the lines in some kinds of poetry. Of course it’s everything in knowing what he’s been through. He’s perfectly unaffected; and don’t you think he’s good?”
“Oh yes,” sighed Mrs. Bowen. “In his way.”
“But he sees through you. Oh, quite! Nothing escapes him, and pretty soon he lets out that he has seen through you, and then you feel so flat! Oh, it’s perfectly intoxicating to be with him. I would give the world to talk as he does.”
“What was your talk all about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it would have been called rather intellectual.”
Mrs. Bowen smiled infinitesimally. But after a moment she said gravely, “Mr. Colville is very much older than you. He’s old enough to be your father.”
“Yes, I know that. You feel that he feels old, and it’s perfectly tragical. Sometimes when he turns that slow, dull, melancholy look on you, he seems a thousand years old.”
“I don’t mean that he’s positively old,” said Mrs. Bowen. “He’s only old comparatively.”
“Oh yes; I understand that. And I don’t mean that he really seems a thousand years old. What I meant was, he seems a thousand years off, as if he were still young, and had got left behind somehow. He seems to be on the other side of some impassable barrier, and you want to get over there and help him to our side, but you can’t do it. I suppose his talking in that light way is merely a subterfuge to hide his feeling, to make him forget.”
Mrs. Bowen fingered the edges of her book. “You mustn’t let your fancy run away with you, Imogene,” she said, with a little painful smile.
“Oh, I like to let it run away with me. And when I get such a subject as Mr. Colville, there’s no stopping. I can’t stop, and I don’t wish to stop. Shouldn’t you have thought that he would have been perfectly crushed at the exhibition he made of himself in the Lancers last night? He wasn’t the least embarrassed when he met me, and the only allusion he made to it was to say that he had been up late, and had danced too much. Wasn’t it wonderful he could do it? Oh, if I could do that!”
“I wish he could have avoided the occasion for his bravado,” said Mrs. Bowen.
“I think I was a little to blame, perhaps,” said the girl. “I beckoned him to come and take the vacant place.”
“I don’t see that that was an excuse,” returned Mrs. Bowen primly.
Imogene seemed insensible to the tone, as it concerned herself; it only apparently reminded her of something. “Guess what Mr. Colville said, when I had been silly, and then tried to make up for it by being very dignified all of a sudden?”
“I don’t know. How had you been silly?”
The servant brought in some cards. Imogene caught up the pelisse which she had been gradually shedding as she sat talking to Mrs. Bowen, and ran out of the room by another door.
They did not recur to the subject. But that night, when Mrs. Bowen went to say good night to Effie, after the child had gone to bed, she lingered.
“Effie,” she said at last, in a husky whisper, “what did Imogene say to Mr. Colville today that made him laugh?”
“I don’t know,” said the child. “They kept laughing at so many things.”
“Laughing?”
“Yes; he laughed. Do you mean
