Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/136

124 richer look. Clearly she was at a height of satisfaction about something—it spread and spread more before him. "For all that really, you know, she is now his wife!"

He threw himself amazedly back. "You mean she practically isn't?" And then as her eyes but appeared to fill it out: "Is that what you've been having from him?—and is that what we've done?"

She looked away a little—she turned off again. "Of course I've wanted the full truth—as to what I've done."

Our friend could imagine that, at strict need; but wondrous to him with it was this air in her as of the birth of a new detachment. "What you've 'done,' it strikes me, might be a little embarrassing for us; but you speak as if you really quite enjoyed it!"

This was a remark, he had to note, by which she wasn't in the least confounded; so that if he had his impression of that odd novelty in her to which allusion has just been made, it might indeed have been quite a new Jane who now looked at him out of her conscious eyes. "He likes to talk to me, poor dear."

She treated his observation as if that quite met it—which couldn't but slightly irritate him; but he hadn't in the least abjured self-control, he was happy to feel, on his returning at once: "And you like to talk with him, obviously since he appears so beautifully and quickly to have brought you round from your view of him as merely low."