"Then make her, for of course she's in love with you."
No good; Mrs. Benson could not cope with the psychology of these two.
She felt that her only hope lay in propinquity, so if Richard would not
go to Joan the roles must be reversed and Joan must be brought to
Richard. She watched their meeting with scarcely veiled eagerness.
They shook hands without a tremor; a short, matter-of-fact clasp.
Curious creatures! Mrs. Benson felt baffled, and angry with Richard;
what was he thinking about? He treated Joan like another boy. No wonder
the love affair was not prospering!
Elizabeth was already there when the Ogdens arrived, and she, too,
watched the little comedy with some interest. She would rather have
liked to talk to Richard about Cambridge, it was so long since she
herself had been there, but Lawrence Benson was for ever at her elbow,
quietly obtrusive. He had taken to wearing pince-nez lately. Elizabeth
wished that he had not chosen the new American rimless glasses; she felt
that any effort to render pince-nez decorative only accentuated their
hideousness. She found herself looking at Lawrence, comparing the shine
on his evening shirt front with the disconcerting shine of his glasses.
He was very immaculate, with violets in his buttonhole, but he had aged.
The responsibility of partnership and riches appeared to have thinned
his sleek hair. Perhaps it made you old before your time to be a member
of one of the largest banking firms in England--old and prim and tidy.
Elizabeth wondered.
Lawrence reminded her of an expensive mahogany filing cabinet in which
reposed bundles of papers tied with red tape. Everything about him was
perfectly correct, from the small, expensive pearl that clasped his
stiff shirt, to his black silk socks and patent leather shoes. His
cuff-links were handsome but restrained, his watch-chain was platinum
and gold, not too thick, his watch was an expensive repeater in the
plainest of plain gold cases.
Elizabeth felt his thin, dry fingers touch her arm as he stooped over
her chair. "You look beautiful to-night," he murmured.
She believed him, for she knew that her simple black dress suited her
because of its severity. The fashion that year was for a thousand little
bows and ruches, but Elizabeth had not followed it; she had draped
herself in long, plain folds, from which her fine neck and shoulders
emerged triumphantly white. She was the statuesque type of woman, who
would always look her best in the evening, for then the primness that
crept into her everyday clothes was perforce absent. She smiled across
at Joan, as though in some way Lawrence's compliment concerned her.
They went in to dinner formally. Mr. Benson gave his arm to Mrs. Ogden,
Lawrence to Elizabeth, and Richard to Joan. Milly was provided with a
Cambridge friend of Richard's, and Mrs. Benson was pompously escorted by
the local vicar.
Something of Mrs. Ogden's habit of melancholy fell away during dinner.
She noticed Lawrence looking in her direction, and remembered with a
faint thrill of satisfaction that although now he was obviously in love
with Elizabeth, some years ago he had admired her. Joan, watching her
mother, was struck afresh by her elusive prettiness that almost amounted
to beauty. It had been absent of late, washed away by tears and
ill-health, but to-night it seemed to be born anew, a pathetic thing,
like a venturesome late rosebud that colours in the frost.
Joan's mind went back to that long past Anniversary Day when her mother
had worn a dress of soft grey that had made her look like a little dove.
How long ago it seemed! It had been the last of many. It had ceased to
exist owing to her father's failing health, and now there was no money
to start it again. As she watched her mother she wished that it could be
re-established, for it had given Mrs. Ogden such intense pleasure,
filled her with such a harmless, if foolish, sense of importance. On
Anniversary Day she had been able to rise above all her petty worries;
it had been _her_ Day, one out of the three hundred and sixty-five.
Perhaps, after all, it had done much to obliterate for the time being
the humiliations of her married life. Joan had never thought of this
possibility before, but now she felt that hidden away under the bushel
of affectations, social ambitions and snobbishness that The Day had
stood for, there might well have burnt a small and feeble candle--the
flame of a lost virginity.
The same diaphanous prettiness hung about her mother now, and Joan
noticed that her brown hair was scarcely greyer than it had been all
those years ago. She felt a sudden, sharp tenderness, a passionate sense
of regret. Regret for what? She asked herself, surprised at the violence
of her own emotion; but the only answer she could find was too vague and
vast to be satisfactory. "Oh, for everything! for everything," she
murmured half aloud.