They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between
rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say,
and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long
duologues of silence. Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not
with conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of
her history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped
hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.
She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind,
it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way
in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty
she had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care for
the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington,
where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.
And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and
make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all
her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after
and protecting from matrimonial perils.
"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver? I hear he's been
staying with you at the Blenkers'."
She smiled. "Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr. Carver is a very clever
man. He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is simply a
good advertisement as a convert."
"A convert to what?"
"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know, they
interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody
else's tradition--that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid
to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another
country." She smiled across the table. "Do you suppose Christopher
Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with
the Selfridge Merrys?"
Archer changed colour. "And Beaufort--do you say these things to
Beaufort?" he asked abruptly.
"I haven't seen him for a long time. But I used to; and he understands."
"Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us. And you like
Beaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room and
out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung
along the shore. "We're damnably dull. We've no character, no colour,
no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"
Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder. But she sat
silent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened
lest she should answer that she wondered too.