§ 1
I did not see Lady Mary Justin for nearly seven months after my return
to England. Of course I had known that a meeting was inevitable, and I
had taken that very carefully into consideration before I decided to
leave South Africa. But many things had happened to me during those
crowded years, so that it seemed possible that that former magic would
no longer sway and distress me. Not only had new imaginative interests
taken hold of me but--I had parted from adolescence. I was a man. I had
been through a great war, seen death abundantly, seen hardship and
passion, and known hunger and shame and desire. A hundred disillusioning
revelations of the quality of life had come to me; once for example when
we were taking some people to the concentration camps it had been
necessary to assist at the premature birth of a child by the wayside, a
startlingly gory and agonizing business for a young man to deal with.
Heavens! how it shocked me! I could give a score of such grim
pictures--and queer pictures....
And it wasn't only the earthlier aspects of the life about me but also
of the life within me that I had been discovering. The first wonder and
innocence, the worshipping, dawn-clear passion of youth, had gone out of
me for ever....
§ 2
We met at a dinner. It was at a house the Tarvrilles had taken for the
season in Mayfair. The drawing-room was a big white square apartment
with several big pictures and a pane of plate glass above the fireplace
in the position in which one usually finds a mirror; this showed another
room beyond, containing an exceptionally large, gloriously colored
portrait in pastel--larger than I had ever thought pastels could be.
Except for the pictures both rooms were almost colorless. It was a
brilliant dinner, with a predominating note of ruby; three of the women
wore ruby velvet; and Ellersley was present just back from Arabia, and
Ethel Manton, Lady Hendon and the Duchess of Clynes. I was greeted by
Lady Tarvrille, spoke to Ellersley and Lady Hendon, and then discovered
a lady in a dress of blue and pearls standing quite still under a
picture in the opposite corner of the room and regarding me attentively.
It was Mary. Some man was beside her, a tall grey man with a broad
crimson ribbon, and I think he must have spoken of me to her. It was as
if she had just turned to look at me.
Constantly during those intervening months I had been thinking of
meeting her. None the less there was a shock, not so much of surprise as
of deferred anticipation. There she stood like something amazingly
forgotten that was now amazingly recalled. She struck me in that brief
crowded instant of recognition as being exactly the person she had been
when we had made love in Burnmore Park; there were her eyes, at once
frank and sidelong, the old familiar sweep of her hair, the old familiar
tilt of the chin, the faint humor of her lip, and at the same time she
seemed to be something altogether different from the memories I had
cherished, she was something graver, something inherently more splendid
than they had recorded. Her face lit now with recognition.