Judith might well have thought herself betrayed by the disclosure which
Esther had made in her irritated curiosity, in her resentful desire to
confront the smiling young man with the pathetic picture of a girl in
tears. When a woman says to a man, of another woman, "See how fond she
is of you!" there is generally implied the reproach, "And you
under-rate, you slight, you don't return, her affection." Such a
reproach had certainly underlain the contrast Esther drew between
Judith's tears and the smiles in which Arthur had presumably indulged
during his talk with Ayesha Layard. But Arthur took the contrast
lightly; it did not really come home to him; he did not seek to explore
its possible meaning, the suggestion contained in it. Lightly too he
seemed to have taken Bernadette's telegram--her recollection of him at a
crisis of his fortunes, coming out of the silence and darkness in which
her flight had wrapped her. Here was a thing which might surely have
moved him to emotion, rousing poignant memories? But when Miss Ayesha
Layard rather made fun of it, he had not minded! Even this account of
what had happened--this faint adumbration of the truth--agreed ill with
Esther's previous conception of him.