d elaborate cover for her own very simple meaning?

Unless, indeed, she was not quite so simple as she seemed. In
courtship the Colonel had shown himself vacillating, to say the
least of it. If Mrs. Fazakerly wanted to bring him to the point it
was obviously her interest to get Miss Tancred out of her way. In
other words, to throw her in Durant's way. His delicacy shrank from
the baseness of this conjecture, but his reason, as well as his
experience, suggested that the thing was not impossible. Mrs.
Fazakerly had been studying him, and she was shrewd enough to see
that the surest way to interest him in Miss Tancred was to set his
intellect to work on her. She had doubtless observed his _fin de
siecle_ contempt for the obvious, his passion for the thing beyond
his grasp, his worship of the far-fetched, the intangible, the
obscure. Thus she thought to inflame his curiosity by hinting that
Frida Tancred was incomprehensible, while she touched the very soul
of desire by representing her as unattainable. All this was no doubt
very clever of Mrs. Fazakerly; but it was not quite what he had
expected of her.

His suspicions were confirmed by Frida's behavior. Ever since their
last interview she had relapsed into something like her former
reticence. To-night, as if she had an inkling of the atrocious plot,
she avoided him with a sort of terror.

IX

Durant's time was up, but the Colonel had pressed him to stay
another week. He was affectionate; he was firm; he would take no
refusal. He dwelt on the advantages of a prolonged visit. "A little
change," said he, "does us all good. You young fellows are apt to
get into a groove. But you seem brighter since you came. I think
we've shaken you up a bit."

Indeed, at no time had there been room for any doubt as to the
sincerity of his welcome. Though he was so determined to shake
Durant up, to get him out of his groove, and give him fresh ideas,
he betrayed a pitiable dependence on the young fellow. He endeavored
to meet youth on its own ground; he made piteous experiments in the
frivolous. More than once Durant had suspected that the poor
gentleman had asked him down as a protection from the terrors of his
own society. His intellectual resources were evidently giving out.
The barometer was stationary; a fortnight's almost persistent
sunshine had dried up the source of ideas. Having gutted the
_Nineteenth Century_, his mind seemed to be impotently raging for
fresh matter to des