“Oh, is that it?” she said shortly, while we laughed, all three together. “Civilisation--eh?”
I got the impression that she felt left out of something, something she knew was going on, but that didn’t include her quite. Her intuition, I judged, was very keen. Beneath this ordinary conversation she was aware of many things. She was fully conscious of a certain subdued excitement in the three of us, and that between her husband and her guest there was a constant interplay of half-discovered meaning, half-revealed emotion. She was reading me too. Yet all without deliberation; it was intuitive, the mind took no conscious part in it. And, when she spoke of the effect of the valley upon her, I saw her suddenly a little different, too--wild and free, untamed in a sense, and close to the elemental side of life. Her enthusiasm for big weather betrayed it. During the whole of breakfast, indeed, we all were “finding” one another, Julius in particular making notes. For him, of course, there was absorbing interest in this meeting of three souls whom Fate had kept so long apart--the signs of recognition he detected or imagined, the sympathy, the intimacy betrayed by the way things were _taken for granted_ between us. He said no word, however. He was very quiet.
My own feelings, meanwhile, seemed tossed together in too great and violent confusion for immediate disentanglement. My sense of the dramatic fitness of things was worse than unsatisfied--it was shattered. Julius unquestionably had married a superior domestic servant.
“Is the bread to your liking, Professor?”
“I think it’s quite delicious, Mrs. LeVallon. It tempts me even to excess,” I added, facetious in my nervousness. I had used her name at last, but with an effort.
“I made it,” she said proudly. “Mother taught me that before I was fifteen.”
“No,” she laughed, with a touch of playful disappointment. “We get that from a farm five miles down the valley. It’s in special honour of your arrival, this.”
“Our nearest contact with the outside world,” added Julius, “and over a thousand feet below us. We’re on a little plateau here all by ourselves----”
“Put away like,” she interrupted gaily, “as though we’d been naughty,” and then she added, “or for something special and very mysterious.” She looked into his face half archly, half inquisitively, as if aware of something she divined yet could not understand. Her honesty and sincerity made every little thing she said seem dignified. I was again aware of pathos.