Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/201

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tuted for Sherringham a sort of embarrassing publicity. He had impressions, possibly gross and unjust, in regard to the way women move constantly together amid such considerations and subtly intercommunicate, when they do not still more subtly dissemble, the hopes or fears of which persons of the opposite sex form the subject. Therefore poor Biddy would know that if she failed to strike him in the right light it would not be for want of his attention's having been called to her claims. She would have been tacitly rejected, virtually condemned. Peter could not, without a slight sense of fatuity, endeavour to make up for this to her by kindness; he was aware that if any one knew it a man would be ridiculous who should take so much as that for granted. But no one would know it: oddly enough, in this calculation of security he left Biddy herself out. It did not occur to him that she might have a secret small irony to spare for his ingenious and magnanimous impulse to show her how much he liked her in order to make her forgive him for not liking her more. This magnanimity at any rate coloured the whole of Sherringham's visit to Rosedale Road, the whole of the pleasant, prolonged chat that kept him there for more than an hour. He begged the girl to go on with her work and not to let him interrupt it; and she obliged him at last, taking the cloth off the lump of clay and giving him a chance to be delightful by guessing that the shapeless mass was intended, or would be intended after a while, for Nick. He saw that she was more comfortable when she began to smooth it and scrape it with her little stick again, to manipulate it with an ineffectual air of knowing how; for this gave her something to do, relieved her nervousness