“You are always so sympathetic,” she said; and added, reflectively, “and
one can talk of one’s troubles to you without any nonsense.”
I wondered dimly if she meant that as a challenge. I helped myself to a
biscuit thing that looked neither poisonous nor sandy. “You are one of
the most puzzling human beings I ever met,” I said,—a perfectly safe
remark to any woman under any circumstances.
“Do you find me so hard to understand?” she said.
“You are dreadfully complex.” I bit at the biscuit thing, and found it
full of a kind of creamy bird-lime. (I wonder why women _will_ arrange
these unpleasant surprises for me—I sickened of sweets twenty years
ago.)
“How so?” she was saying, and smiling her most brilliant smile.
I have no doubt she thought we were talking rather nicely. “Oh!” said I,
and waved the cream biscuit thing. “You challenge me to dissect you.”
“Well?”
“And that is precisely what I cannot do.”
“I’m afraid you are very satirical,” she said, with a touch of
disappointment. She is always saying that when our conversation has
become absolutely idiotic—as it invariably does. I felt an inevitable
desire to quote bogus Latin to her. It seemed the very language for her.
“Malorum fiducia pars quosque libet,” I said, in a low voice, looking
meaningly into her eyes.
“Ah!” she said, colouring a little, and turned to pour hot water into
the teapot, looking very prettily at me over her arm as she did so.
“That is one of the truest things that has ever been said of sympathy,”
I remarked. “Don’t you think so?”
“Sympathy,” she said, “is a very wonderful thing, and a very precious
thing.”
“You speak,” said I (with a cough behind my hand), “as though you knew
what it was to be lonely.”
“There is solitude even in a crowd,” she said, and looked round at the
six other people—three discreet pairs—who were in the room.
“I, too,” I was beginning, but Hopdangle came with a teacup, and seemed
inclined to linger. He belongs to the “Nice Boy” class, and gives
himself ridiculous airs of familiarity with grown-up people. Then the
Giffens went.
“Do you know, I always take such an interest in your work,” she was
saying to me, when her husband(confound him!) came into the room.
He was a violent discord. He wore a short brown jacket and carpet
slippers, and three of his waistcoat buttons were (as usual) undone.
“Got any tea left, Millie?” he said, and came and sat down in the
arm-chair beside the table.
“How do, Delalune?” he said to the man in the corner. “Damned hot,
Bellows,” he remarked to me, subsiding creakily.
She poured some more hot water into the teapot. (Why must charming
married women always have these husbands?)
“It _is_ very hot,” I said.
There was a perceptible pause. He is one of those rather adipose people,
who are not disconcerted by conversational gaps. “Are _you_, too,
working at Argon?” I said. He is some kind of chemical investigator, I
know.
He began at once to explain the most horribly complex things about
elements to me. She gave him his tea, and rose and went and talked to
the other people about autotypes. “Yes,” I said, not hearing what he was
saying.
“‘No’ would be more appropriate,” he said. “You are absent-minded,
Bellows. Not in love, I hope—at your age?”
Really, I am not thirty, but a certain perceptible thinness in my hair
may account for his invariably regarding me as a contemporary. But he
should understand that nowadays the beginnings of baldness merely mark
the virile epoch. “I say, Millie,” he said, out loud and across the
room, “you haven’t been collecting Bellows here—have you?”
She looked round startled, and I saw a pained look come into her eyes.
“For the bazaar?” she said. “Not yet, dear.” It seemed to me that she
shot a glance of entreaty at him. Then she turned to the others again.
“My wife,” he said, “has two distinctive traits. She is a born poetess
and a born collector. I ought to warn you.”
“I did not know,” said I, “that she rhymed.”
“I was speaking more of the imaginative quality, the temperament that
finds a splendour in the grass, a glory in the flower, that clothes the
whole world in a vestiture of interpretation.”
“Indeed!” I said. I felt she was watching us anxiously. He could not, of
course, suspect. But I was relieved to fancy he was simply talking
nonsense.
“The magnificent figures of heroic, worshipful, and mysterious womanhood
naturally appeal to her—Cleopatra, Messalina, Beatrice, the Madonna, and
so forth.”
“And she is writing—”
“No, she is acting. That is the real poetry of women and children. A
platonic Cleopatra of infinite variety, spotless reputation, and a large
following. Her make-believe is wonderful. She would use Falstaff for
Romeo without a twinge, if no one else was at hand. She could exert
herself to break the heart of a soldier. I assure you, Bellows—”