“I want some more tea,” he said to her. “You misunderstood me about the
collecting, Millie.”
“What were you saying about Cleopatra?” she said, trying, I think, to
look sternly at him.
“Scandal,” he said. “But about the collecting, Bellows—”
“You must come to this bazaar,” she interrupted.
“I shall be delighted,” I said, boldly. “Where is it, and when?”
“About this collecting,” he began.
“It is in aid of that delightful orphanage at Wimblingham,” she
explained, and gave me an animated account of the charity. He emptied
his second cup of tea. “May I have a third cup?” he said.
The two girls signalled departure, and her attention was distracted.
“She collects—and I will confess she does it with extraordinary
skill—the surreptitious addresses—”
“John,” she said over her shoulder, “I wish you would tell Miss Smithers
all those interesting things about Argon.” He gulped down his third cup,
and rose with the easy obedience of the trained husband. Presently she
returned to the tea-things. “Cannot I fill your cup?” she asked. “I
really hope John was not telling you his queer notions about me. He says
the most remarkable things. Quite lately he has got it into his head
that he has a formula for my character.”
“I wish _I_ had,” I said, with a sigh.
“And he goes about explaining me to people, as though I was a mechanism.
‘Scalp collector,’ I think is the favourite phrase. Did he tell you?
Don’t you think it perfectly horrid of him?”
“But he doesn’t understand you,” I said, not grasping his meaning quite
at the minute.
She sighed.
“You have,” I said, with infinite meaning, “my sincere sympathy—” I
hesitated—“my whole sympathy.”
“Thank you _so much_,” she said, quite as meaningly. I rose forthwith,
and we clasped hands, like souls who strike a compact.
Yet, thinking over what he said afterwards, I was troubled by a fancy
that there was the faintest suggestion of a smile of triumph about her
lips and mouth. Possibly it was only an honourable pride. I suppose he
has poisoned my mind a little. Of course, I should not like to think of
myself as one of a fortuitously selected multitude strung neatly
together (if one may use the vulgarism) on a piece of string,—a
stringful like a boy’s string of chestnuts,—nice old gentlemen, nice
boys, sympathetic and humorous men of thirty, kind fellows, gifted
dreamers, and dashing blades, all trailing after her. It is confoundedly
bad form of him, anyhow, to guy her visitors. She certainly took it like
a saint. Of course, I shall see her again soon, and we shall talk to one
another about one another. Something or other cropped up and prevented
my going there on her last Tuesday.