[To SYLVESTER GATES]

She lay on a sofa covered with white marabou, her head sunk deep into a billowy morass of lace-coloured satin and lace-coloured lace. She could see her pointed toes emerging and her arm dangling over the edge as if she had forgotten it. On her finger was a huge emerald ring, a splotch of crème de menthe spilt on the whiteness of her hand. She felt entrenched and anchored in an altogether strong position, so fixed that all advances would have to be made to her. This gave to her voice and to her gestures an indolent melodious security.

As the door opened she turned her eyes round slowly, suppressing all eagerness.

“Mortimer!” She wondered if disappointment could be as easily controlled as joy. “How nice of you to come and see me!”

“Are you glad really?” He was kissing her hand with an unnecessary mixture of shyness and intensity.

“How intolerably literal people in love are,” she thought petulantly; “always forcing significance into everything.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling lazily.

“It is good of you to let me come like this.” How she hated his humility, but “I like you to,” she murmured, automatically kind.

“How lovely you look! Lovelier than ever before as lovely as ever before.” And then, “I love you.”

“Do you think so?” She seemed amused and sceptical.

“Do you doubt it?” He clutched her wrist.

“Not if you put it like that.”

“You are laughing at me,” he recognised sadly.

“Forgive me.” She put her hand on his, lightly, caressingly, her voice gentle and tender.

“But you do know it, don’t you?” He was very insistent.

("Does he think that I am blind and deaf and that no one has ever loved me before?” she wondered irritably.)

“I think you think so,” she prevaricated.

“I know,” he was firm. “I shall love you always.”

“Nonsense.” She was tart with realism. “Why do you fly in the face of all experience with meaningless generalisations?”

“I have never said it before.”

“Then how can you know?”

He hated her barrister mood.

“Elaine, aren’t you glad I love you?”

“Of course.” She closed her eyes wearily. They talked of other things and she remembered how intelligent he was. It had been during these last months very easy to forget. But though her interest was concentrated, his attention was on other things.

“Elaine,” he blurted, “are you going to the country to-morrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“When will you know?”

“I have no idea!”

“But when shall I see you again?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Elaine, please do put me out of my misery.”

“Very well then I shan’t see you again this week.”

“Elaine!”

“Yes.”

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“I am sorry I bothered you; don’t punish me. I promise not to ask any more questions, but please let me know when you come back. Even if you only ring me up on the telephone I shall have heard your voice!”

“Very well.”

“You’re not angry with me, are you?”

“Why should I be?”

“I thought perhaps you were.”

There was a pause. “Is there anything amusing about being loved?” she thought; “what patient women the great coquettes of the world must have been! How I wish I were a crisp intelligent old maid, with a talent perhaps for gardening or books on the Renaissance!”

“How tired you look!” He had taken her hand and was pressing it with funny little jerky grasps. “I wish you belonged to me; I wouldn’t let you spend yourself on every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

“It is so difficult to know,” she murmured, “who is Tom, who is Dick, or who is Harry!”

“When I think of the way your divine sympathy is imposed upon the way your friends take advantage of you!”

“But I like being taken advantage of.”

“People’s selfishness makes me sick. Look at your white face and your drooping eyelids, and your tired little smiles.”

“I am sorry.”

“Sorry! Good God! My beloved, do take care of yourself, please. Promise me not to see any one after I leave; go to bed and pull the blinds.”

“But I am expecting Bill.”

“Bill will be all the better for not getting what he wants for once.”

“But supposing he doesn’t want it?”

“I don’t understand.”

The door opened.

“Bill!” She put out her left hand, all her features lit up with a quiet luminous radiance. His eyes were smiling, but his mouth was grave.

“Elaine!” He said it as if it were a very significant remark, and, though he hadn’t meant to, he caressed her name with his voice.

“Mortimer thinks I ought to go to bed and send you away.”

“But you won’t?”

“Probably not.” She was bubbling over with gaiety. “I am very weak-minded.”

The two men were not looking at one another, but currents of hostility flowed between them. Bill had not fought for Elaine’s love; it had come to him with a strange inevitability. He had no fear of losing it and no particular desire to keep it, but the thought that you possess something that some one else passionately covets is always exhilarating. He would never have admitted it he could never have admitted it, but she was to him like an object dangled on a watch chain not obtrusively displayed but a possession recognised by everybody and taken for granted by him. Only he never seemed bored because he was never tired of mobilising his own charms. And in herself, she delighted him it was only in her relations with him that she got on his nerves. He loved to see her with other men exercising the divine arts of her irresistibility, her every smile, her every gesture, the intonations of her voice, the turn of her head, her bubbling brilliance, her cool indifference, the ice of her intellect, the glow of her sympathy, each contributing to the masterpiece of her coquetry. But with him she was not even a coquette jerky, passionate, nervous, humble, exacting, dull she tired him to death.

“Well, I must be going.” Mortimer spoke doubtfully. There was a pause. Then Elaine pulled herself together.

“Why?”

“I have so much to do.”

“It was so nice of you to come and see me.”

“It was so nice of you to let me come. Please remember your promise to let me know when you come back.”

“Of course.” He was gone.

Wearily she shut her eyes. “Do you remember the time when Mortimer was charming?”

“Indeed I do; he was quite delightful till he fell in love with you. He is really a warning against loving.”

“You hardly heed it, do you?” Her voice was very bitter. How he hated the entry of the acidulated tragic into all their talks.

“Perhaps not.” He felt guilty, knowing how much he was hurting her. “After all you cannot ask me to model myself on the man who bores you most in the world.”

She smiled. “What a good reason for not loving me!”

“The best!” He was smiling his enchanting, flattering smile at her the smile that always seemed to draw you into the Holy of Holies of his confidence.

“I may be going away to-morrow,” she said.

“May you?”

“But I shall be back on Thursday. Shall we dine together that night?”

“I am dining with a Russian friend of mine who is passing through London.”

“Friday, then?”

“Friday I am going to the country for the week-end.”

“Then it will have to be Monday.”

“Yes, I am afraid so.”

“Afraid that you will have to dine with me?”

“How civil you are!”

There was a pause. She wished she could keep all the acid out of her voice. He thought how tiresome women were, always wanting to know just what you were going to do.

“Bill,” she said, holding out her hand, which he took rather perfunctorily. He felt like a dog that knows exactly which trick follows what word of command, but as, from force of habit, he invariably became lover-like when he was absent-minded, he stroked her arm with a significant caressing gesture that filled her with joy.

“Are you glad I love you?” she murmured.

“Of course.”

“There is an intelligent woman,” he thought, “who has had hundreds of men in love with her, making a demand for verbal assurances that can’t possibly add anything to her peace of mind. Either they are true and superfluous, or they are false and transparently unconvincing.”

“Bill,” she said, reading his thoughts, “you can’t understand my wanting mere words, can you?”

“No,” he said, “not you, who know so exactly what they mean.”

“Nevertheless, they are sometimes vaguely comforting and reassuring a sort of local anæsthetic.” He loved her insight, her curious layers of detachment.

“Bill,” she murmured, “I haven’t seen you for ages.”

“Not since two this morning.”

“I don’t count a ball; besides I was too tired to stop dancing.”

“You danced like an angel and your eyes were shining with ecstasy, lighting hopes all round, though of course I knew you didn’t know your partner from the parquet if he happened to be as good as the floor.”

“You love watching me, don’t you? much better than seeing me.” How he wished she weren’t always right.

“Remember what a wonderful drama you are, Elaine.”

“A drama in which you have played lead. But you only liked the first act the Comedy Act, and you won’t even enjoy the curtain as much as you think, because always there will be the nasty certainty of its some day going up again, and then you won’t even be in the wings.”

How diabolically clear-sighted she was!

“Bill, dearest,” she held out her hand, “you are reaching the moment when you long to be the third person. You want a little rest. You have come to the point in the life of every lover when he prefers the husband to the wife.”

But this was more than he could stand. A horrible shadow was being cast over his future, romance was shrinking before his eyes. Frightened, he bent down and kissed her. “Darling,” he murmured, nestling his face in her neck, “what nonsense you talk.”

Love, passion, romance, fidelity all were vindicated by this deliberate act.

Her doubts, her certainties, subsided, vanished hypnotised with happiness. “I was teasing,” she lied.

“I must go,” he said.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Not just this moment, please; five more minutes.”

“It will be just as difficult then.”

“But I shall have had five more minutes.”

“How practical you are!”

He stayed.

“I will write to you.”

“Do.”

“And I shall try and be back in time for tea Thursday, then I shall see you, in spite of your stupid Russian.”

“If I can get away.”

“Can’t you bring him to dine with me?”

“I’m afraid not; he has asked some one else.”

“Shall I have some forms printed with ‘I miss you, bless you,’ for you to sign and send me each day.”

“Goose!”

“Well, at any rate, I shall have you properly on Monday.”

“Yes.”

“And please make a great effort about Thursday.”

“Yes.”

She drew him down to her, holding his face in her hands.

“It is silly to love at my time of life,” she said; “I am too young. It is like wearing a lovely new dress to climb mountains in.”

“You will always be young,” he said; “you are eternal.”

It was his considered view; he wished she weren’t. Kissing her a little absently he walked to the door; then because he had always done so, he walked back.

“Bless you,” he said. It was perfunctory and final. The shutting of the door turned out the light in her eyes.

“How tired I am!” she thought, and then “Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.”