Chapter 18

When Gertrude found herself beside Trefusis in the Pullman, she
wondered how she came to be travelling with him against her
resolution, if not against her will. In the presence of two women
scrutinizing her as if they suspected her of being there with no
good purpose, a male passenger admiring her a little further off,
her maid reading Trefusis's newspapers just out of earshot, an
uninterested country gentleman looking glumly out of window, a
city man preoccupied with the "Economist," and a polite lady who
refrained from staring but not from observing, she felt that she
must not make a scene; yet she knew he had not come there to hold
an ordinary conversation. Her doubt did not last long. He began
promptly, and went to the point at once.

"What do you think of this engagement of mine?"

This was more than she could bear calmly. "What is it to me?" she
said indignantly. "I have nothing to do with it."

"Nothing! You are a cold friend to me then. I thought you one of
the surest I possessed."

She moved as if about to look at him, but checked herself, closed
her lips, and fixed her eyes on the vacant seat before her. The
reproach he deserved was beyond her power of expression.

"I cling to that conviction still, in spite of Miss Lindsay's
indifference to my affairs. But I confess I hardly know how to
bring you into sympathy with me in this matter. In the first
place, you have never been married, I have. In the next, you are
much younger than I, in more respects than that of years. Very
likely half your ideas on the subject are derived from fictions
in which happy results are tacked on to conditions very
ill-calculated to produce them--which in real life hardly ever do
produce them. If our friendship were a chapter in a novel, what
would be the upshot of it? Why, I should marry you, or you break
your heart at my treachery."

Gertrude moved her eyes as if she had some intention of taking to
flight.

"But our relations being those of real life--far sweeter, after
all--I never dreamed of marrying you, having gained and enjoyed
your friendship without that eye to business which our nineteenth
century keeps open even whilst it sleeps. You, being equally
disinterested in your regard for me, do not think of breaking
your heart, but you are, I suppose, a little hurt at my
apparently meditating and resolving on such a serious step as
marriage with Agatha without confiding my intention to you. And
you punish me by telling me that you have nothing to do with it--
that it is nothing to you. But I never meditated the step, and so
had nothing to conceal from you. It was conceived and executed in
less than a minute. Although my first marriage was a silly love
match and a