Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/10

2 "Ah, that's impossible," said Mrs. Dallow. Then she added: "The day is so nice."

"Lovely weather," Nick dropped. "You want to get away from Mrs. Gresham, I suppose."

Mrs. Dallow was silent a moment. "From everything!"

""Well, I want to get away too."

"It has been such a racket. Listen to the dear birds."

"Yes, our noise isn't so good as theirs," said Nick. "I feel as if I had been married and had shoes and rice thrown after me," he went on. "But not to you, Julia—nothing so good as that."

Mrs. Dallow made no answer to this; she only turned her eyes on the ornamental water which stretched away at their right. In a moment she exclaimed: "How nasty the lake looks!" and Nick recognized in the tone of the words a manifestation of that odd shyness—a perverse stiffness at a moment when she probably only wanted to be soft—which, taken in combination with her other qualities, was so far from being displeasing to him that it represented her nearest approach to extreme charm. He was not shy now, for he considered, this morning, that he saw things very straight and in a sense altogether superior and delightful. This enabled him to be generously sorry for his companion, if he were the reason of her being in any degree uncomfortable, and yet left him to enjoy the prettiness of some of the signs by which her discomfort was revealed. He would not insist on anything yet: so he observed that his cousin's standard in lakes was too high, and then talked a little about his mother and the girls, their having gone home, his not having seen