Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/180

Rh I’m here often; and she comes now and then. But the journey’s tiresome, and it is not always easy for her to get away.” He checked himself, and Justine saw that he, in turn, was suddenly conscious of the incongruity of explaining and extenuating his personal situation to a stranger. “But then we’re not strangers!” a voice in her exulted, just as he added, with an embarrassed attempt to efface and yet justify his moment of expansion: “That reminds me—I think you know my wife. I heard her asking Mrs. Dressel about you. She wants so much to see you.”

The transition had been effected, at the expense of dramatic interest, but to the obvious triumph of social observances; and to Justine, after all, regaining at his side the group about the marquee, the interest was not so much diminished as shifted to the no less suggestive problem of studying the friend of her youth in the unexpected character of John Amherst’s wife.

Meanwhile, however, during the brief transit across the Gaines greensward, her thoughts were still busy with Amherst. She had seen at once that the peculiar sense of intimacy reawakened by their meeting had been chilled and deﬂected by her ﬁrst allusion to the topic which had previously brought them together: Amherst had drawn back as soon as she named the mills. What could be the cause of his reluctance? When they had last met, the subject burned within [ 164 ]