Yes, she was marvellously fresh! He had never met any one like her. And it _was_ innocence, it _must_ be. Yet she was very conscious of the power of her beauty and her sex--over him at any rate. She obviously knew nothing of the furtive attention she was exciting in a place where so many jaded experts came to look at the flowers. It was the naïve and innocent Aspasia in every young girl bubbling up with entire frankness. She was amazed and half frightened at herself--he could see that.
Well! he was very content to be Pericles for a space, to join hands and tread a measure with her and the rosy-bosomed hours in their dance.
It was as though they had known each other for ever and a day, ere half the elaborate dinner was over.
She had called him "Gilbert" at once, as if he were her brother, her lover even. He could have found or forged no words to describe the extraordinary intimacy that had sprung up between them. It almost seemed unreal, he had to wonder if this were not a dream.
She became girlishly imperious. When they brought the golden plovers--king and skipper, as good epicures know, of all birds that fly--she leant over the table till her perfect face was close to his.
He told her how these little birds, with their "trail" upon the toast and their accompaniment of tiny mushrooms stewed in Sillery, were said to be the rarest flower in the gourmet's garden, one of the supreme pleasures that the cycle of the seasons bring to those who love and live to eat.
"How _perfectly_ sweet! Like the little roast pigling was to Elia! Gilbert, I'm so happy."
She chattered away to him, as he sat and watched her, with an entire freedom. She told him all about her life in the flat with Ethel Harrison. Her brown eyes shone with happiness, he heard the silver ripple of her voice in a mist of pleasure.
Once he caught a man whom he knew watching them furtively. It was a very well-known actor, who at the moment was rehearsing his autumn play.
This celebrated person was, as Gilbert well knew, a monster. He lived his life with a dreadful callousness which made him capable of every bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity.
The poet shuddered as he caught that evil glance, and then, listening anew to Rita's joyous confidences, he became painfully aware of the brute that is in every man, in himself too, though as yet he had never allowed it to be clamant.