“I think we’re going off somehow. I believe it is a good deal the women’s fault; this new craze for advanced talk between the sexes is no good, the women who affect it are never clever enough nor good enough to make a success of the thing, it’s a pose mostly, as their smoking is, just done for effect.—Tolly, pass that jam!”
When he had rounded off his meal with a hunch of bread and strawberry jam, he stretched himself, went to the window and looked out, drumming gently on the pane.
“I wonder,” he thought, “I wonder if I am quite a fool or not, but—but, God! how I love her!”
Then he stopped drumming, and began to wonder vaguely how in the name of Heaven he was able to eat great hunches of bread and jam not five minutes before.
He turned and watched Tolly through the door, devouring at his ease, with a sudden shock of disgust, more at himself than at the fellow, with his hideous mouth all moist and jammy. He turned again to the window and tried to steady his brain, but it reeled and everything in the room swam before him, he dropped his head in his hands and trembled from head to foot, when he raised it he felt steadier and not so raging hot.
“I shall chance it,” he said, “I shall chance it.”
When he reached Lady Mary’s he was in a much more wholesome frame of mind. He had gone there by roundabout ways, where he saw a good deal of stark, staring, naked humanity; this helped to crystallize his emotions, to sift the dross out and leave the clean stuff.
He never in his life felt clearer-headed than when he went up the stairs unannounced, and paused to look through the half opened door at Gwen, sitting near a window in a cloudy dress of soft yellow crêpey stuff and with her strong, long-fingered, composed hands lying idle in her lap and the guard dropped from her eyes, showing a good deal more of herself than he had ever seen before.
He only paused for one minute, he had no right yet to the girl’s secrets; then he threw open the door with a little bang and brought her back to the present.
“Oh, is it you?” she said with the ghost of a start, looking up at him.
She felt in a vague way that he knew more of her in that one minute than he had any business to do, and she was not quite sure if she liked it or not. He did not offer to shake hands with her but glanced round the room silently. Gwen laughed.