He had decided that it would be a trifle edged to say that such matters were not often discussed at Calcutta dinner-tables, when she added, with apparent inconsistency and real dejection, “It is a hideous bore.”

Lindsay saw his point admitted, and even in the way she brushed it aside he felt that she was generous.  Yet something in him—­perhaps the primitive hunting instinct, perhaps a more sophisticated Scotch impulse to explore the very roots of every matter, tempted him to say, “He gives up a good deal, doesn’t he, for his present gratification?”

“He gives up everything!  That is the disgusting part of it.  Leander Morris offered him—­ But why should I tell you?  It’s humiliating enough in the very back of one’s mind.”

“He is a clever fellow, no doubt.”

“Not too clever to act with me!  Oh, we go beautifully—­we melt, we run together.  He has given me some essential things, and now I can give them back to him.  I begin to think that is what keeps him now.  It must be awfully satisfying to generate artistic life in—­ in anybody, and watch it grow.”

“Doubtless,” said Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her eyebrows twitched together, but she said nothing.  Although she knew his very moderate power of analysis he seemed to look, with his eyes on the carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it with a cynical clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little hardness came about her mouth.  “Well,” he said, visibly detaching himself from the matter, “it’s a satisfaction to have you back.  I have been doing nothing, literally, since you went away, but making money and playing tennis.  Existence, as I look back upon it, is connoted by a varying margin of profit and a vast sward.”

She looked at him with eyes in which sympathy stood remotely, considering the advisability of returning.  “It’s a pity you can’t act,” she said; “then you could come away and let it all go.”

Lindsay smiled at her across the gulf he saw fixed.  “How simple life is to you!” he said.  “But anyway I couldn’t act.”

“Oh no, you couldn’t, you couldn’t!  You are too intensely absorbent, you are too rigidly individual.  The flame in you would never consent even for an instant to be the flame in anybody else—­ any of those people who, for the purpose of the state, are called imaginary.  Never!”

It seemed a punishment, but all Lindsay said was:  “I wish you would go on.  You can’t think how gratifying it is—­after the tennis.”

“If I went on I have an idea that I might be disagreeable.”

“Oh then, stop.  We can’t quarrel yet—­I’ve hardly seen you.  Are you comfortable here?  Would you like some French novels?”

“Yes, thank you.  Yes, please!” She grew before him into a light and conventional person, apparently on her guard against freedom of speech.  He moved a blind and ineffectual hand about to find the spring she had detached herself from, and after failing for a quarter of an hour he got up to go.