"Rather a funny thing happened the other day," she remarked.
"Yes?" I replied languidly.
"About you."
"Oh!" I said with animation. "Do tell me."
"It was at lunch," she explained, "at Duke's. The people at the next
table were talking about you. I couldn't help hearing a little. A man
there said he had met you in Shanghai."
"Not really!" I exclaimed.
"Yes. He met you in Shanghai."
"That's frightfully interesting," I said. "What did he say about me?"
"That's what I couldn't hear," she replied. "You see I had to pay some
attention to my own crowd. I only caught the word 'delightful.'"
Ever since she told me this. I have been turning it over in my mind; and
it is particularly vexing not to know more. "Delightful" can be such
jargon and mean nothing--or, at any rate, nothing more than amiability.
Still, that is something, for one is not always amiable, even when
meeting strangers. On the other hand it might be, from this man, the
highest praise.
The whole thing naturally leads to thought, because I have never been
farther east than Athens in my life.
Yet here is a man who met me in Shanghai. What does it mean? Can we
possibly visit other cities in our sleep? Has each of us an _alter ego_,
who can really behave, elsewhere?
Whether we have or not, I know that this information about my Shanghai
double is going to be a great nuisance to me. It is going to change my
character. In fact it has already begun to do so. Let me give you an
example.
Only yesterday I was about to be very angry with a telegraph boy who
brought back a telegram I had despatched about two hours earlier, saying
that it could not be delivered because it was insufficiently addressed.
Obviously it was not the boy's fault, for he belonged to our country
post-office and the telegram had been sent to London and was returned
from there; and yet I started to abuse that boy as though he were not
only the POSTMASTER-GENERAL himself but the inventor of red-tape into
the bargain. And all for a piece of carelessness of my own.
And then suddenly I remembered Shanghai and how delightful I was there.
And I shut up instantly and apologised and rewrote the message and gave
the boy a shilling for himself. If one could be delightful in Shanghai
one must be delightful at home too.
And so it is going to be. There is very little fun for me in the future,
and all because of that nice-mannered man in Shanghai whom I must not
disgrace. For it would be horrible if one day a lady told him that she
had overheard someone who had met him in London and found him to be a
bear.
* * * * *