"Then why didn't you so much as look at me a while ago?"
"Didn't I look at you?"
"You know perfectly you didn't. Mrs. Server did--with her unutterable
intensity; making me feel afresh, by the way, that I've never seen a
woman compromise herself so little by proceedings so compromising. But
though you saw her intensity, it never diverted you for an instant from
your own."
He lighted before he answered this a fresh cigarette. "A man engaged in
talk with a charming woman scarcely selects that occasion for winking at
somebody else."
"You mean he contents himself with winking at _her_? My dear fellow,
that wasn't enough for you yesterday, and it wouldn't have been enough
for you this morning, among the impressions that led to our last talk.
It was just the fact that you did wink, that you _had_ winked, at me
that wound me up."
"And what about the fact that you had winked at _me_? _Your_
winks--come"--Obert laughed--"are portentous!"
"Oh, if we recriminate," I cheerfully said after a moment, "we agree."
"I'm not so sure," he returned, "that we agree."
"Ah, then, if we differ it's still more interesting. Because, you know,
we didn't differ either yesterday or this morning."
Without hurry or flurry, but with a decent confusion, his thoughts went
back. "I thought you said just now we did--recognising, as you ought,
that you were keen about a chase of which I washed my hands."
"No--I wasn't keen. You've just mentioned that you remember my giving
up. I washed my hands too."
It seemed to leave him with the moral of this. "Then, if our hands are
clean, what are we talking about?"
I turned, on it, a little more to him, and looked at him so long that he
had at last to look at me; with which, after holding his eyes another
moment, I made my point. "Our hands are not clean."
"Ah, speak for your own!"--and as he moved back I might really have
thought him uneasy. There was a hint of the same note in the way he went
on: "I assure you I decline all responsibility. I see the responsibility
as quite beautifully yours."
"Well," I said, "I only want to be fair. You were the first to bring it
out that she was changed."
"Well, she isn't changed!" said my friend with an almost startling
effect, for me, of suddenness. "Or rather," he immediately and
incongruously added, "she _is_. She's changed back."
"'Back'?" It made me stare.
"Back," he repeated with a certain sharpness and as if to have done at
last, for himself, with the muddle of it.
But there was that in me that could let him see he had far from done;
and something, above all, told me now that he absolutely mustn't have
before I had. I quickly moreover saw that I must, with an art, make him
want not to. "Back to what she was when you painted her?"