It evidently too, what I said, gave her pleasure--a pleasure that she caught and held. "Well, you can't say I dress it."
"No, you dress, I make out, ninety-three. If you _would_ only dress twenty-five you'd look fifteen."
"Fifteen in a schoolroom charade!" She laughed at this happily enough. "Your compliment to my taste is odd. I know, at all events," she went on, "what's the difference in Mr. Long."
"Be so good then, for my relief, as to name it."
"Well, a very clever woman has for some time past----"
"Taken"--this beginning was of course enough--"a particular interest in him? Do you mean Lady John?" I inquired; and, as she evidently did, I rather demurred. "Do you call Lady John a very clever woman?"
"Surely. That's why I kindly arranged that, as she was to take, I happened to learn, the next train, Guy should come with her."
"You arranged it?" I wondered. "She's not so clever as you then."
"Because you feel that _she_ wouldn't, or couldn't? No doubt she wouldn't have made the same point of it--for more than one reason. Poor Guy hasn't pretensions--has nothing but his youth and his beauty. But that's precisely why I'm sorry for him and try whenever I can to give him a lift. Lady John's company _is_, you see, a lift."
"You mean it has so unmistakably been one to Long?"
"Yes--it has positively given him a mind and a tongue. _That's_ what has come over him."
"Then," I said, "it's a most extraordinary case--such as one really has never met."
"Ah, so very seldom! Yes--I've positively never met it. Are you very sure," I insisted, "that Lady John is the influence?"
"I don't mean to say, of course," she replied, "that he looks fluttered if you mention her, that he doesn't in fact look as blank as a pickpocket. But that proves nothing--or rather, as they're known to be always together, and she from morning till night as pointed as a hat-pin, it proves just what one sees. One simply takes it in."
I turned the picture round. "They're scarcely together when she's together with Brissenden."
"Ah, that's only once in a way. It's a thing that from time to time such people--don't you know?--make a particular point of: they cultivate, to cover their game, the appearance of other little friendships. It puts outsiders off the scent, and the real thing meanwhile goes on. Besides, you yourself acknowledge the effect. If she hasn't made him clever, what has she made him? She has given him, steadily, more and more intellect."