Very soon she got into the way of never talking to me at all,
save about Alice and Nicholas Oke and Christopher Lovelock; and then, when
the fit seized her, she would go on by the hour, never asking herself
whether I was or was not equally interested in the strange craze that
fascinated her. It so happened that I was. I loved to listen to her, going
on discussing by the hour the merits of Lovelock's poems, and analysing her
feelings and those of her two ancestors. It was quite wonderful to watch
the exquisite, exotic creature in one of these moods, with the distant look
in her grey eyes and the absent-looking smile in her thin cheeks, talking
as if she had intimately known these people of the seventeenth century,
discussing every minute mood of theirs, detailing every scene between them
and their victim, talking of Alice, and Nicholas, and Lovelock as she might
of her most intimate friends. Of Alice particularly, and of Lovelock. She
seemed to know every word that Alice had spoken, every idea that had
crossed her mind. It sometimes struck me as if she were telling me,
speaking of herself in the third person, of her own feelings--as if I were
listening to a woman's confidences, the recital of her doubts, scruples,
and agonies about a living lover.
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