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Updated: May 10, 2025
Would it have come so confidingly to anyone but her? The Colonel knew its name he had collected it. Very common, he said. The interest in it passed; but Lennan stayed, bent forward, gazing at that silk-covered knee. The voice of Mrs. Ercott, sharper than its wont, said: "What day does Robert say he wants you back, my dear?"
A great number of people were sitting there, taking mysterious anodyne, doing the right thing; to avoid them, he kept along the rails, and ran almost into the arms of Colonel and Mrs. Ercott, who were coming from the direction of Knightsbridge, slightly flushed, having lunched and talked of 'Monte' at the house of a certain General.
And the old gentleman, glaring a little, as it seemed to her, from under his eyelids and his grey top hat, had answered: "Colonel Ercott, I think? Here's the fellow himself Mark!" And a young man had taken off his hat. She had only noticed at first that his dark hair grew not long but very thick; and that his eyes were very deep-set.
Ercott it was especially jolly to be out of Town 'this confounded crowded time of year. And so the days of early June went by, each finer than the last. And then Cramier came down, without warning on a Friday evening. It was hot in London...the session dull.... The Jubilee turning everything upside down.... They were lucky to be out of Town! A silent dinner that! Mrs.
He realized, with a sense of shock, that he was deprived of all interests in life but one; not even his work had any meaning apart from HER. It lit no fire within him to hear Mrs. Ercott praise certain execrable pictures in the Royal Academy, which she had religiously visited the day before leaving home.
But in the grey, dusty railway-carriage when she had left him, he was like a man drugged, staring at where she had sat opposite. Two hours later, at dinner in her hotel, between her and Mrs. Ercott, with the Colonel opposite, he knew for the first time what he was faced with.
If the Colonel had not cared so much about his niece, and had liked, instead of rather disliking Cramier; if Mrs. Ercott had not found Mark Lennan a 'nice boy, and had not secretly felt her husband's niece rather dangerous to her peace of mind; if, in few words, those three had been puppets made of wood and worked by law, it would have been so much simpler for all concerned.
Less tolerant in theory, he was touched at heart; Mrs. Ercott, in theory almost approving she read that dangerous authoress, George Eliot at heart felt cold towards her husband's niece. For these reasons they could not in fact conspire without, in the end, saying suddenly: "Well, it's no good talking about it!" and almost at once beginning to talk about it again.
But for one reason or another he had never seen the great race, and the notion that it was his duty to see it had now come to him. He proposed this to Mrs. Ercott with some diffidence. She read so many books he did not quite know whether she would approve. Finding that she did, he added casually: "And we might take Olive." Mrs. Ercott answered dryly: "You know the House of Commons has a holiday?"
Dolly was an imaginative woman, but something told him that in this case she might not be riding past the hounds. Mrs. Ercott raised herself. He looked more good than ever; a little perplexed frown had climbed up with his eyebrows and got caught in the wrinkles across his forehead. "I'm very fond of Olive," he said. Mrs. Ercott fell back on her pillows.
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