“I’ll say that you live in a palace, with seven attendant princes, and seventy-seven handmaids!”
“Yes!” she agreed gleefully. “Who’s that woman looking for?”
The woman in question was a stout person in a sort of official uniform. Her eyes traveled over the few guests at the little restaurant; in her hand she held a blue envelope. “She’s looking for me. She’s been sent on from my hotel, depend upon it,” I said, with a queer sense of annoyance. I, who had been fuming because my instructions did not come!
I was right. The woman gave me the envelope and took my receipt. I made a rapid examination of my package. “I must be off early to-morrow morning,” I said to Lucinda.
She did say, “I’m sorry,” but without any sign of emotion. And the next moment she added, “Because you’ll just miss Arsenio. He arrives to-morrow evening—to pay me a visit.”
“I think I’m rather glad to miss Arsenio,” I remarked frankly. “Oh, not because he ran away with you, and made fools of us all that day, but because of what you’ve been telling me just now.”
“If you liked him before, you’d like him still. He hasn’t changed a bit, he’s just as he always was—very attractive in his good and gay moods, very naughty and perverse in his bad ones. Yes, just the same. And that’s what makes it so unfair in me to—to feel as I do about him now. That’s one of the difficult things about love, isn’t it? And marriage. The other person may go on being just what he was—what you knew he was; but you may change yourself, and so not like him any more—at least, not be content; because there’s a lot about Arsenio that I still like.” Her eyes now wore their most self-examining, introspective look.
She pushed her chair back from the table. “It’s late, and you’ve got to start early. And I must be early and long at work, to make up for lost time—if it’s not rude to call it that.”
I raised my glass. “Then—to our next meeting!”
“Heaven knows! I roam up and down the earth, like the Enemy of Mankind. But, after all, in these days to be on the earth and not under it, is something. And you, Lucinda?”
“I suppose I shall stay here—with Madame—Chose. War or no war, ladies must have _lingerie_, mustn’t they?”
“Well—yes,” said Lucinda. “But one of us must earn some money, you see. Even if I were that sort of person—and I don’t think I am—I couldn’t afford to do anything useful or heroic. The pay for that isn’t high enough.”