The knot of ladies dissolved. Jimmie put Norma's teacup down and went slowly back with her to the main room. He was feeling depressed, having lost his bearings in this unfamiliar world. Suddenly he halted.
“To test whether I am awake. Have I really heard a sane and educated lady expressing her belief in the visions of a crystal-gazing adventuress?”
“You have. She believes firmly. So do heaps of women.”
“I hope to heaven you don't!” he cried with a sudden intensity.
“What concern can my faith be to you?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon. No concern at all,” he said apologetically. “But I generally blurt out what is in my mind.”
“And what is in your mind? I am a person you can be quite frank with.”
“I could n't bear the poem of your life to be sullied by all these vulgarities,” said Jimmie.
“As I remarked to you the first evening I met you, Mr. Padgate,” she said, holding out her hand by way of dismissal, “you are an astonishing person!”
The poem of her life! The phrase worried her before she slept that night. She shook the buzzing thing away from her impatiently. The poem of her life! The man was a fool.
A YOUNG woman bred to a material view of the cosmos and self-trained to cynical expression of her opinions may thoroughly persuade herself that marriage is a social bargain in which it would be absurd for sentiment to have a place, and yet when the hour comes for deciding on so trivial an engagement, may find herself in an irritatingly unequable frame of mind. For Norma the hour had all but arrived. Morland King had asked to see her alone in view of an important conversation. She had made an appointment for ten o'clock, throwing over her evening's engagements. Her parents were entertaining a couple of friends in somebody else's box at the opera, and would return in time to save the important conversation from over-tediousness. She intended to amuse herself placidly with a novel until King's arrival.
This was a week or two after her encounter with Jimmie at the picture-gallery, since which occasion she had neither seen nor heard of him. He had faded from the surface of a consciousness kept on continued strain by the thousand incidents and faces of a London season. To Jimmie the series of meetings had been a phenomenon of infinite import. She had come like a queen of romance into his homely garden, and her radiance lingered, making the roses redder and the grass more green. But the queenly apparition herself had other things to think about, and when she had grown angry and called him a fool, had dismissed him definitely from her mind. It was annoying therefore that on this particular evening the fool phrase should buzz again in her ears.