Constantly during those intervening months I had been thinking of meeting her. None the less there was a shock, not so much of surprise as of deferred8 anticipation9. There she stood like something amazingly forgotten that was now amazingly recalled. She struck me in that brief crowded instant of recognition as being exactly the person she had been when we had made love in Burnmore Park; there were her eyes, at once frank and sidelong, the old familiar sweep of her hair, the old familiar tilt10 of the chin, the faint humor of her lip, and at the same time she seemed to be something altogether different from the memories I had cherished, she was something graver, something inherently more splendid than they had recorded. Her face lit now with recognition.
I went across to her at once, with some dull obviousness upon my lips.
"And so you are back from Africa at last," she said, still unsmiling. "I saw about you in the papers.... You had a good time."
"I had great good luck," I replied.
"I never dreamt when we were boy and girl together that you would make a soldier."
I think I said that luck made soldiers.
Then I think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making soldiers or only finding them out. I saw that she had not intended to convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. But our minds were remote from the words upon our lips. We were like aphasiacs who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. The impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of impossible utterances12. It was with a real quality of rescue that our hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table, and to introduce me to mine. "You shall have him again on your other side," she said to Lady Mary with a charming smile for me, treating me as if I was a lion in request instead of the mere11 outsider I was.
We talked very little at dinner. Both of us I think were quite unequal to the occasion. Whatever meetings we had imagined, certainly neither of us had thought of this very possible encounter, a long disconcerting hour side by side. I began to remember old happenings with an astonishing vividness; there within six inches of me was the hand I had kissed; her voice was the same to its lightest shade, her hair flowed off her forehead with the same amazingly familiar wave. Was she too remembering? But I perhaps had changed altogether....
"Why did you go away as you did?" she asked abruptly13, when for a moment we were isolated14 conversationally15. "Why did you never write?"
"What else could I do?"
She turned away from me and answered the man on her left, who had just addressed her....
When the mid-dinner change came we talked a little about indifferent things, making a stiff conversation like a bridge over a torrent17 of unspoken intimacies18. We discussed something; I think Lady Tarvrille's flowers and the Cape19 Flora20 and gardens. She told me she had a Japanese garden with three Japanese gardeners. They were wonderful little men to watch. "Humming-bird gardeners," she called them. "They wear their native costume."
"We are your neighbors in Surrey," she said, going off abruptly from that. "We are quite near to your father."
She paused with that characteristic effect of deliberation in her closed lips. Then she added: "I can see the trees behind your father's house from the window of my room."
"Yes," I said. "You take all our southward skyline."
She turned her face to me with the manner of a great lady adding a new acquaintance to her collection. But her eyes met mine very steadily21 and intimately. "Mr. Stratton," she said—it was the first time in her life she had called me that—"when we come back to Surrey I want you to come and see me and tell me of all the things you are going to do. Will you?"
点击收听单词发音
1 pane | |
n.窗格玻璃,长方块 | |
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2 ruby | |
n.红宝石,红宝石色 | |
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3 velvet | |
n.丝绒,天鹅绒;adj.丝绒制的,柔软的 | |
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4 spoke | |
n.(车轮的)辐条;轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 v.讲,谈(speak的过去式);说;演说;从某种观点来说 | |
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5 standing | |
n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的 | |
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6 attentively | |
adv.聚精会神地;周到地;谛;凝神 | |
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7 crimson | |
n./adj.深(绯)红色(的);vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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8 deferred | |
adj.延期的,缓召的v.拖延,延缓,推迟( defer的过去式和过去分词 );服从某人的意愿,遵从 | |
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9 anticipation | |
n.预期,预料,期望 | |
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10 tilt | |
v.(使)倾侧;(使)倾斜;n.倾侧;倾斜 | |
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11 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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12 utterances | |
n.发声( utterance的名词复数 );说话方式;语调;言论 | |
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13 abruptly | |
adv.突然地,出其不意地 | |
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14 isolated | |
adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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15 conversationally | |
adv.会话地 | |
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16 phantom | |
n.幻影,虚位,幽灵;adj.错觉的,幻影的,幽灵的 | |
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17 torrent | |
n.激流,洪流;爆发,(话语等的)连发 | |
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18 intimacies | |
亲密( intimacy的名词复数 ); 密切; 亲昵的言行; 性行为 | |
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19 cape | |
n.海角,岬;披肩,短披风 | |
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20 flora | |
n.(某一地区的)植物群 | |
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21 steadily | |
adv.稳定地;不变地;持续地 | |
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