He appeared to recognise this complication—of Bender’s voracious integrity; but only to push it away. “Well, I don’t know whether the best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers—but I feel to-day that they’re the best keepers.”
The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl’s dimmer fire. “It’s as if it were suddenly in the air that you’ve brought us some light or some help—that you may do something really good for us.”
“Do you mean ‘mark down,’ as they say at the shops, all your greatest claims?”
His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest. This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. “I dare say that if you did even that we should have to take it from you.”
“Then it may very well be,” he laughed back, “the reason why I feel, under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and afraid.”
“That shows,” she returned, “that you suspect us of horrors hiding from justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us over!”
Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked—it all came back to his being more charmed. “Heaven knows I’ve wanted a chance at you, but what should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply to mount my ‘bike’ again and spin away?”
“I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you’d turn right round and come back. You’d think again of Mr. Bender.”
“Whom I don’t, however, you see—if he’s prowling off there—in the least want to meet.” Crimble made the point with gaiety. “I don’t know what I mightn’t do to him—and yet it’s not of my temptation to violence, after all, that I’m most afraid. It’s of the brutal mistake of one’s breaking—with one’s priggish, precious modernity and one’s possibly futile discriminations—into a general situation or composition, as we say, so serene and sound and right. What should one do here, out of respect for that felicity, but hold one’s breath and walk on tip-toe? The very celebrations and consecrations, as you tell me, instinctively stay outside. I saw that all,” the young man went on with more weight in his ardour, “I saw it, while we talked in London, as your natural setting and your native air—and now ten minutes on the spot have made it sink into my spirit. You’re a case, all together, of enchanted harmony, of perfect equilibrium—there’s nothing to be done or said.”
His friend listened to this eloquence with her eyes lowered, then raising them to meet, with a vague insistence, his own; after which something she had seen there appeared to determine in her another motion. She indicated the small landscape that Mr. Bender had, by Lady Sandgate’s report, rapidly studied and denounced. “For what do you take that little picture?”