Mrs. Willoughby laughed awkwardly.  ‘What nonsense!’ she said.

‘A mere jeu d’esprit, I admit,’ said he, and he waved his hand to signify that he could be equally witty every day in the week if he chose.  His satisfaction, indeed, blinded him to the fact that his speech might be construed as uncommonly near to a proposal of marriage.  He thought, with a cast back to his old dilettante spirit, that it would be amusing to repeat it, especially to a woman of the sentimental kind—­Clarice Mallinson, for instance.  He pictured the look of injury in her eyes and laughed again.

CHAPTER XII

Clarice was indeed even more disappointed than Mrs. Willoughby imagined.  She had looked forward to her marriage, and had indeed been persuaded to look forward to it, as to the smiting of a rock in her husband’s nature whence a magical spring of inspiration should flow perennially.  ’The future owes us a great deal,’ Mallinson had said.  ‘It does indeed,’ Clarice had replied in her most sentimental tones.  Only she made the mistake of believing that the date of her marriage was the time appointed for payment.  Instead of that spontaneous flow of inspiration, she had beneath her eyes a process of arduous work, which was not limited to a special portion of the day, like the work of a business man, and which, in the case of a man with Mallinson’s temperament, inevitably produced an incessant fretfulness with his surroundings.  Now, since this work was done not in an office but at home, the burden of that fretfulness fell altogether upon Clarice.

She took to reading the Morte d’Arthur.  Fielding found her with the book in her hand when he called, and commented on her choice.

‘There’s no romance in the world nowadays,’ she replied.

‘But there has been,’ he replied cheerfully; ‘lots.’

Clarice professed not to understand his meaning.  He proceeded to tick off upon his ringers those particular instances in which he knew her to have had a share, and mentioned the names of the gentlemen.  He omitted Drake’s, however, and Clarice noticed the omission.  For the rest she listened quite patiently until he came to an end.  Then she asked gravely, ‘Do you think that is quite a nice way to talk to a married woman?’

‘No,’ he admitted frankly, ‘I don’t.’  For a few minutes the conversation lagged.

This was, however, Fielding’s first visit since his home-coming, and Clarice yielded to certain promptings of curiosity.

’I hardly expected you would be persuaded to go out to Africa, even by—­any one,’ she concluded lamely.

‘Neither did I,’ he replied.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ she asked.

‘I went out a Remus, I return a Romulus.’

There were points in Clarice’s behaviour which never failed to excite Fielding’s admiration.  Amongst these was a habit she possessed of staring steadily into the speaker’s face with all the appearance of complete absence of mind whenever an allusion was made which she did not understand, and then continuing the conversation as though the allusion had never been made.  ‘Of course you had a companion,’ she said.