She let her ungloved hand rest for an instant upon mine. Had she left it
there for two, I should have gone down on my knees before her, or have
stood on my head at her feet--have made a fool of myself in some way or
another before the whole room full. She timed it to a nicety.
"I don't want _you_ to pay me compliments," she said, "I want us to be
friends. Of course, in years, I'm old enough to be your mother." (By
the register I should say she might have been thirty-two, but looked
twenty-six. I was twenty-three, and I fear foolish for my age.) "But
you know the world, and you're so different to the other people one
meets. Society is so hollow and artificial; don't you find it so? You
don't know how I long sometimes to get away from it, to know someone to
whom I could show my real self, who would understand me. You'll come and
see me sometimes--I'm always at home on Wednesdays--and let me talk to
you, won't you, and you must tell me all your clever thoughts."
It occurred to me that, maybe, she would like to hear a few of them there
and then, but before I had got well started a hollow Society man came up
and suggested supper, and she was compelled to leave me. As she
disappeared, however, in the throng, she looked back over her shoulder
with a glance half pathetic, half comic, that I understood. It said,
"Pity me, I've got to be bored by this vapid, shallow creature," and I
did.
I sought her through all the rooms before I went. I wished to assure her
of my sympathy and support. I learned, however, from the butler that she
had left early, in company with the hollow Society man.
A fortnight later I ran against a young literary friend in Regent Street,
and we lunched together at the Monico.
"I met such a charming woman last night," he said, "a Mrs. Clifton
Courtenay, a delightful woman."
"Oh, do _you_ know her?" I exclaimed. "Oh, we're very old friends. She's
always wanting me to go and see her. I really must."
"Oh, I didn't know _you_ knew her," he answered. Somehow, the fact of my
knowing her seemed to lessen her importance in his eyes. But soon he
recovered his enthusiasm for her.
"A wonderfully clever woman," he continued. "I'm afraid I disappointed
her a little though." He said this, however, with a laugh that
contradicted his words. "She would not believe I was _the_ Mr. Smith.
She imagined from my book that I was quite an old man."
I could see nothing in my friend's book myself to suggest that the author
was, of necessity, anything over eighteen. The mistake appeared to me to
display want of acumen, but it had evidently pleased him greatly.
"I felt quite sorry for her," he went on, "chained to that bloodless,
artificial society in which she lives. 'You can't tell,' she said to me,
'how I long to meet someone to whom I could show my real self--who would
understand me.' I'm going to see her on Wednesday."
I went with him. My conversation with her was not as confidential as I
had anticipated, owing to there being some eighty other people present in
a room intended for the accommodation of eight; but after surging round
for an hour in hot and aimless misery--as very young men at such
gatherings do, knowing as a rule only the man who has brought them, and
being unable to find him--I contrived to get a few words with her.
She greeted me with a smile, in the light of which I at once forgot my
past discomfort, and let her fingers rest, with delicious pressure, for a
moment upon mine.
"How good of you to keep your promise," she said. "These people have
been tiring me so. Sit here, and tell me all you have been doing."