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Page 11
"Do you know, though he's so much older than me--I simply shudder when
I think he's thirty-seven--and so awfully clever, and _so_ bad-tempered,
I'm not in the least afraid of him. And he really has a shocking bad
temper."
"I know it of old."
"So many nice people have bad tempers. I think it's the least horrid
fault you can have; because it comes on you when you're not thinking,
and it isn't your fault at all."
"No; it is generally some one else's."
"I don't think much of people's passions myself. He might have something
far worse than that."
"Most undoubtedly. He might have atrocious taste in dress, or a tendency
to drink."
"Don't be silly. Did you know him when he was young? I don't mean to say
he isn't young--thirty-seven's young enough for anybody--I mean when he
was young like me?"
"I can't say. I doubt if he was ever young--like you. But I knew him when
he was a boy."
"So you understand him?"
"Oh, pretty well. Not always, perhaps. He's a difficult subject."
"Anyhow, you like him? Don't you?"
Stanistreet gave a curious hard laugh.
"Oh yes--I like him."
"That's all right. And really, I don't wonder that people can't make him
out. He's the strangest animal _I_ ever met in my life. I haven't made
him out yet. I think I shall give him up."
"Give him up, by all means. Isn't that what people generally do when they
can't understand each other?"
Mrs. Nevill Tyson made no answer. She was trying to think, and thinking
came hard to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"I suppose he's had a past. But of course it doesn't do to go poking and
probing into a man's past--"
Stanistreet lifted his eyebrows and looked at the little woman. She was
sitting bolt upright, staring out over the vague fields; she seemed to
have uttered the words unconsciously, as if at the dictation of some
familiar spirit. "And yet I wish--no, I don't wish I knew. I know he must
have had an awful time of it." She turned her face suddenly on
Stanistreet. "What do you think he told me the other day? He said he had
never known anybody who wasn't either a fool or a sinner. What do you
think of that? Must you be one or the other?"
Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. "You may be both. We are all of us
sinners, and certainly a great many of us are fools."
"I wonder. He isn't a fool."
Stanistreet wondered too. He wondered at the things she allowed herself
to say; he wondered whether she was drawing any inference; and above all,
he wondered at the shrinking introspective look on her careless face.
In another minute Mrs. Nevill Tyson had started from her seat and was
waving her muff wildly in the air. "Look--there he goes! Oh, _did_ you
see him take that fence? What an insane thing to do with the ground
like that."
He looked in the direction indicated by the muff, and saw Tyson riding
far ahead of the hunt, a small scarlet blot on the gray-white landscape.
"By Jove! he rides as if he were charging the enemy's guns at the head of
a line of cavalry."
"Yes." She leaned back; the excitement faded from her face, and she
sighed. The sigh was so light that it scarcely troubled the frosty air,
but it made Stanistreet look at her again. How adorably pretty she was
in all her moods!
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