'Really!' she laughed. 'Now I didn't know men ever felt like that. It's exactly how I feel about it. It really is worse than dentistry, you know, because you are not allowed gas.'
'At least, not laughing gas, but only gaseous laughter and small talk,' I suggested.
'Which makes you all hazy and muddled without the compensating boon of unconsciousness. But you are an author and a journalist, Mr. Freydon--my brother often speaks of you, you know--and so you must have had lots of experience of this sort of thing; enough to have made you as hardened as royalty, I should think. I always think of authors and journalists as living very much in the limelight.'
I explained that some might, but that I had spent several years in Dorking without, until that day, attending a single social function of any kind. This seemed to interest her greatly, once I had overcome her initial incredulity on the point. Then I had to answer questions about my way of living, and one or two, of a discreet and gently curious kind, about my methods of working, and the like. There was flattery of the most delightful kind in the one or two casual references she made to characters in books of mine. Miss Lane never said: 'I have read your books,' or, 'I have been interested by your books,' statements which always produce an awkward pause, and are not interesting in themselves. But she showed in a much more pleasing way that one's work had entered into her life, and been welcomed by her.
Quite apart from this, I do not think I could possibly have spent a quarter of an hour with Cynthia Lane without concluding that she was the most charming woman I had ever met. 'Charming woman,' I say. Heavens! How extraordinarily inadequate these threadbare words do look, as I write them, recalling the image of Cynthia Lane as she paced with me across that smooth-shaven lawn--green velvet it seemed, deeply shaded here and there by noble copper beeches.
I suppose Cynthia was beautiful, even judged by technical standards; for her figure was lissom and very shapely, and the contour of her sweet face perfect--so far, at least, as I am any judge of such matters. Her eyes and her hair had a rare loveliness which I have not seen equalled. But it was the soul of her, the indefinable essence that was Cynthia Lane, which made her truly lovely. This personality of hers, at once tender and adroit, bright and grave, humorous and most sweetly gentle, most admirably kind, shone out upon one from her face, from her very movements and gestures even, giving to her outward person a soft radiance which I cannot attempt to describe. This nimbus of delicate sweetness, this irradiation of her person by her personality it was, which made Cynthia Lane lovely, as no other woman I have met has been.
I must have stolen fully half an hour of her time that day, to the annoyance it may be of many other people. And it was not until she was being in a sense almost forcibly drawn away from me by the claims of others that I learned, from the manner in which she was addressed by Lady Barthrop, that she, Cynthia Lane, of whom I had thought only as one of Lane's five sisters, as one among my own fellow guests, was indeed the guest of the occasion, and the betrothed of Lady Barthrop's younger son.
Other things happened, no doubt. I was presently introduced to young Barthrop, the bridegroom to be; and, mechanically, I endeavoured to comport myself fittingly as a guest. But, for me, the entertainment ended with my separation from Cynthia.
'Do please stop being a recluse, and call while I am here,' she had said as she was being drawn away from me into a sort of maelstrom of gaily coloured dresses, and laughing, compliment-paying men. And I blessed her for that.