Vance, who fancied herself
lonely when he was away, was too much engaged with notes, telegrams and
arriving and departing guests, to do more than breathlessly smile upon his
presence, or implore him to take the dullest girl of the party for a drive
(and would he go by way of Millbrook, like a dear, and stop at the market
to ask why the lobsters hadn't come?); and the house itself, and the
guests who came and went in it like people rushing through a railway-
station, offered no points of repose to his thoughts. Some houses are
companions in themselves: the walls, the book-shelves, the very chairs and
tables, have the qualities of a sympathetic mind; but Mrs. Vance's
interior was as impersonal as the setting of a classic drama.
These conditions made Vibart cultivate an assiduous exchange of books
between himself and Mr. Carstyle. The young man went down almost daily to
the little house in the town, where Mrs. Carstyle, who had now an air of
receiving him in curl-papers, and of not always immediately distinguishing
him from the piano-tuner, made no effort to detain him on his way to her
husband's study.
III
Now and then, at the close of one of Vibart's visits, Mr. Carstyle put on
a mildewed Panama hat and accompanied the young man for a mile or two on
his way home. The road to Mrs. Vance's lay through one of the most amiable
suburbs of Millbrook, and Mr. Carstyle, walking with his slow uneager
step, his hat pushed back, and his stick dragging behind him, seemed to
take a philosophic pleasure in the aspect of the trim lawns and opulent
gardens.
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