'Friends?'
'He is willing to take his place as one.'
'He will find it singularly uninteresting. Friendship between a man and a woman!'
He shrugged his shoulders; then he laughed to himself. Mrs. Willoughby got up nervously from her chair and walked to the opposite end of the room.
'These things,' continued Fielding in a perfectly complacent and unconscious tone, 'are best understood by their symbols.'
Mrs. Willoughby swung round. 'Symbols?' she asked curiously.
Fielding took a seat and leaned back comfortably. 'The feelings and emotions,' he began, 'have symbols in the visible world. Of these symbols the greater number are flowers. I won't trouble you with an enumeration of them, for in the first place I couldn't give it, and in the second, Shakespeare has provided a fairly comprehensive list. And by nature I am averse to challenging comparisons. There are, however, feelings of which the symbols are not flowers, and amongst them we must reckon friendship between man and woman. Passion, we know, has its passion flower, but the friendship I am speaking of has its symbol too'—he paused impressively—'and that symbol is cold boiled mutton.'
Mrs. Willoughby laughed awkwardly. 'What nonsense!' she said.
'A mere jeu d'esprit, I admit,' said he, and he waved his hand to signify that he could be equally witty every day in the week if he chose. His satisfaction, indeed, blinded him to the fact that his speech might be construed as uncommonly near to a proposal of marriage. He thought, with a cast back to his old dilettante spirit, that it would be amusing to repeat it, especially to a woman of the sentimental kind—Clarice Mallinson, for instance. He pictured the look of injury in her eyes and laughed again.