For him this dance was to be remembered as the beginning of his friendship with Rose Mallett; but at the moment he was merely annoyed at being prevented from watching Henrietta’s dark head appearing and disappearing among the other dancers like that of a bather in a rough sea. He said, “Oh, thank you very much. Are you sure there’s nobody else? But I suppose there can’t be”; and holding her at arm’s length, he ambled round her, treading occasionally on her toes. He apologized: he was no good at dancing: he hoped he had not hurt her slippers, or her feet.
She paused and looked down at them. “You mustn’t do that to Henrietta. Her slippers are yellow and you would spoil them.”
“She isn’t giving me a single dance!” he burst out. “I asked her to, but I never thought I ought to get a promise. Nobody told me. Nobody tells me anything.”
An icily angry gentleman remonstrated with him for standing in the fairway and Rose suggested that they should sit down.
“You see, I’m no good. I can’t dance. I can’t please her.”
“Charles, you’re still in the way. Let us go somewhere quiet and then you can tell me all about it.”
He took her to a small room leading from the big one. “I’ll shut the door,” he said, “and then we shan’t hear that hideous din.”
“It’s profane,” Charles said wearily. “Music—they call it music!” He was off at a great pace and she did not try to hold him in. She lay back in the big chair and seemed to study the toes on which Charles Batty had trampled. His voice rolled on like the sound of water, companionable and unanswerable. Suddenly his tone changed. “Henrietta is very unkind to me.”
“Is there any reason why she shouldn’t be?”
“I do everything I can think of. I’ve told her all about myself.”
“I’ve done that, too. Perhaps I haven’t done it enough. I’ve given her chocolates and flowers. What else ought I to do?”
Her voice, very calm and clear after his spluttering, said, “Not too much.”
“Oh!” This was a new idea. “Oh! I never thought of that. Why—”
She interrupted his usual cry. “Women are naturally cruel.”
“Are they? I didn’t know that either.” He swallowed the information visibly. She could almost see the process of digestion. “Oh!” he said again.
“They don’t mean to be. They are simply untouched by a love they don’t return.” She added thoughtfully: “And inclined to despise the lover.”