Followed this waylaying! Its resolute character makes me think it was
the chin's doing; that "common mortal" touch which stands in such good
stead to some women. Because men, I mean really masculine men, those
whose generations have evolved an ideal woman, are often very timid. Who
wouldn't be before the ideal? It's your sentimental trifler, who has
just missed being nothing at all, who is enterprising, simply because it
is easy to appear enterprising when one does not mean to put one's belief
to the test.
Well, whatever it was that encouraged him, Captain Anthony stuck to Flora
de Barral in a manner which in a timid man might have been called heroic
if it had not been so simple. Whether policy, diplomacy, simplicity, or
just inspiration, he kept up his talk, rather deliberate, with very few
pauses. Then suddenly as if recollecting himself:
"It's funny. I don't think you are annoyed with me for giving you my
company unasked. But why don't you say something?"
I asked Miss de Barral what answer she made to this query.
"I made no answer," she said in that even, unemotional low voice which
seemed to be her voice for delicate confidences. "I walked on. He did
not seem to mind. We came to the foot of the quarry where the road winds
up hill, past the place where you were sitting by the roadside that day.
I began to wonder what I should do. After we reached the top Captain
Anthony said that he had not been for a walk with a lady for years and
years--almost since he was a boy. We had then come to where I ought to
have turned off and struck across a field. I thought of making a run of
it. But he would have caught me up. I knew he would; and, of course, he
would not have allowed me. I couldn't give him the slip."
"Why didn't you ask him to leave you?" I inquired curiously.
"He would not have taken any notice," she went on steadily. "And what
could I have done then? I could not have started quarrelling with
him--could I? I hadn't enough energy to get angry. I felt very tired
suddenly. I just stumbled on straight along the road. Captain Anthony
told me that the family--some relations of his mother--he used to know in
Liverpool was broken up now, and he had never made any friends since. All
gone their different ways. All the girls married. Nice girls they were
and very friendly to him when he was but little more than a boy. He
repeated: 'Very nice, cheery, clever girls.' I sat down on a bank
against a hedge and began to cry."