“Was once, Mr. Inquisitive. No, I must say I’ve been rather off old Plo since the Bloomsbury push took him up so strong. I’m on the Hellenic tack now--Pelester of Chios, you know, and Xanthus the Younger, and the fragments of the Thracian papyrus that Bötzdorff edited--though I don’t think much of _his_ gloss, str--th I don’t.”
“I must show you my Plotinus,” Gav broke in on her gathering enthusiasm. “It’s a fine copy. 1722, I think.”
“My G--dn--ss! 1722! Printed at Venice, I s’pose: Palestrine fount and borders by Manucci.… I know the sort. Bless your innocent heart! _that’s_ no b----y good! Common as dirt, these are. If _that’s_ all you know about the Arbiter, you’re no good to me. So ta-ta, _caro incognito_!”
“But here!” he caught her by the sleeve. “Take this, I beg as a favour--a token to remember our little meeting.”
Gaveston slipped from his finger the exquisite cameo of Cypriote turquoise that the old Duchesa da Chianti had bequeathed him, and quickly but tactfully wrapping it in a ten-pound note, he pressed it into her little quivering palm.[13]
Smiling gently at the amazing variegation of his metropolitan adventures, Gaveston crossed towards Vigo Street. Already a heartless shaft of madder light was sullenly annunciating the approach of yet another aenigmatick day. They had lingered talking a long time out there. And as he tore off his crumpled white waistcoat with impatient, smoke-stained fingers, he wondered suddenly about his father. There was a queer Quixotic strain in him, he felt, that surely did not come from the ffoulises.
But he grew tired, and, drawing the too transparent dimity curtains tighter against the dawn, he leapt into bed. And through the fitful dreams that so often attend sunlight sleep, there flitted furtively the ill-matched figures of his mother and the mysterious wanton, confused in a sinister identity beyond all possibility of disentanglement.
Next afternoon, when Gaveston saw the prosaic mass of Paddington loom up before him, it seemed to his bewitched imagination a sudden gateway into past centuries of enchantment. The sirens of automobiles sang discordantly, flags frenetically waved, signals symbolically dropped, guards swung athletically on to their vans. Gathering daemonic impetus as it went, the 2.35 moved out Oxfordwards, and Gaveston, leaning back in the comfortably upholstered first-class compartment, fingered the unopened copy of the _University Gazette_ which he had chosen from the bookstall’s alluring variety.