He was very shy and nervous. He had decided at the last moment to accept
her invitation, but he hadn't known where Rumpelmayer's was, and several
bus-conductors had failed to give adequate information. (I think he
expected something about as large as Selfridge's.) Anyhow, that
accounted for the delay. He was sorry, and he hoped we hadn't been
waiting long.
The awkward part of it was that I had to leave them almost immediately
for an unpostponable duty in Fleet Street. It was unfortunate, I
thought, because Helen might think I had invented the appointment in
order to leave her alone with Terry. Perhaps she did; but at any rate
she seemed not to care. "I hope you won't be late," she said, smiling as
she shook hands with me. And then she summoned the waitress and gave a
fresh order.
As I rode back on the top of a bus to Fleet Street, the whole interview
seemed almost incredible. It was queer enough to find Terry breaking his
cast-iron rules by having tea with her; but it was positively
sensational for her to have calmly confessed to being in love with him,
and for me to have comforted her with the assurance that being in love
wasn't frightfully important. But that was the sort of thing she had
power to do; she could have confessed murder, I believe, and have made
you feel that murder wasn't frightfully important.
Often since then I have pondered over the matter and wondered what I
_ought_ to have done. Whatever it was, it was probably more heroic than
what I did, which was merely to wait, telling myself over and over again
that neither the one nor the other of them was a fool, and that there
were certain things which only fools did....