If Lady Anne thought so she didn't say so.
"I dare say the fault has been partly on my side," continued Egbert,
with evaporating cheerfulness. "After all, I'm only human, you
know. You seem to forget that I'm only human."
He insisted on the point, as if there had been unfounded suggestions
that he was built on Satyr lines, with goat continuations where the
human left off.
The bullfinch recommenced its air from Iphigenie en Tauride. Egbert
began to feel depressed. Lady Anne was not drinking her tea.
Perhaps she was feeling unwell. But when Lady Anne felt unwell she
was not wont to be reticent on the subject. "No one knows what I
suffer from indigestion" was one of her favourite statements; but
the lack of knowledge can only have been caused by defective
listening; the amount of information available on the subject would
have supplied material for a monograph.
Evidently Lady Anne was not feeling unwell.
Egbert began to think he was being unreasonably dealt with;
naturally he began to make concessions.
"I dare say," he observed, taking as central a position on the
hearth-rug as Don Tarquinio could be persuaded to concede him, "I
may have been to blame. I am willing, if I can thereby restore
things to a happier standpoint, to undertake to lead a better life."
He wondered vaguely how it would be possible. Temptations came to
him, in middle age, tentatively and without insistence, like a
neglected butcher-boy who asks for a Christmas box in February for
no more hopeful reason that than he didn't get one in December.
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