Lushington was certain that Margaret had been at least once again to
Logotheti's house with Madame De Rosa, but he did not believe that she
had stayed to luncheon, for she had not remained in the house much over
half-an-hour.
During all this time he made no attempt to communicate with her, and
was uncomfortably aware that Logotheti was having it all his own way.
He yielded to a morbid impulse in watching the two, since no good could
come of it for himself or Margaret. Almost every time he went out on
the Versailles road he knew that he should see them together before he
came back, and he knew equally well that he could do nothing to
separate them. He wondered what it was that attracted such a woman as
Margaret Donne to such a man, and with a humility which his friends and
enemies would have been far from suspecting in him he honestly tried to
compare himself with Logotheti, and to define the points in which the
latter had the advantage of him.
Very naturally, he failed to discover them. In spite of what
philosophers tell us, most of us know ourselves pretty well. The
conclusive and irrefutable proof of this is that we always know when we
are not telling, or showing, the truth about ourselves, as, for
instance, when we are boasting or attributing to ourselves some gift,
some knowledge, or some power which we really do not possess. We also
know perfectly well when our impulses are good and when they are bad,
and can guess approximately how much courage we have in reserve for
doing the one, and how far our natural cowardice will incline us to do
the other. But we know very little indeed about other people, and
almost always judge them by ourselves, because we have no other
convenient standard. A great many men are influenced in the same
general way by the big things in life, but one scarcely ever finds two
men who are similarly affected by the little things from which all
great results proceed. Mark Antony lost the world for a woman, but it
was for a woman that Tallien overthrew Robespierre and saved France.
So Lushington's comparison came to nothing at all, and he was no nearer
to a solution of his problem than before.
Then came the unexpected, and it furnished him with a surprisingly
simple means of comparing himself with his rival in the eyes of
Margaret herself.
There are several roads from Paris to Versailles, as every one knows,
leaving the city on opposite sides of the Seine. Hitherto Logotheti had
always taken the one that leads to the right bank, along the Avenue de
Versailles to the Porte St. Cloud. Another follows the left bank by Bas
Meudon, but the most pleasant road goes through the woods Fausses
Reposes.