He took a dark red carnation out of one of the vases and pinned it on to her coat.
'The next time I see you,' she said, 'I want to have a long, long talk.'
'Oh yes; we must, mustn't we?'
He took her downstairs, put her into a cab. It was half-past six.
He felt something false, worrying, unreliable and incalculable in Mavis. She didn't seem real…. He wished she were fortunate and happy; but he wished even more that he were never going to see her again. And still!…
He walked a little way, then got into a taxi and drove to see Edith. When he was in this peculiar condition of mind—the odd mixture of self-reproach, satisfaction, amusement and boredom that he felt now —he always went to see Edith, throwing himself into the little affairs of her life as if he had nothing else on his mind. He was a little anxious about Edith. It seemed to him that since Aylmer had been away she had altered a little.
CHAPTER XVI
More of the Mitchells
Edith had become an immense favourite with the Mitchells. They hardly ever had any entertainment without her. Her success with their friends delighted Mrs Mitchell, who was not capable of commonplace feminine jealousy, and who regarded Edith as a find of her own. She often reproached Winthrop, her husband, for having known Bruce eight years without discovering his charming wife.
One evening they had a particularly gay party. Immediately after dinner Mitchell had insisted on dressing up, and was solemnly announced in his own house as Prince Gonoff, a Russian noble. He had a mania for disguising himself. He had once travelled five hundred miles under the name of Prince Gotoffski, in a fur coat, a foreign accent, a false moustache and a special saloon carriage. Indeed, only his wife knew all the secrets of Mitchell's wild early career of unpractical jokes, to some of which he still clung. When he was younger he had carried it pretty far. She encouraged him, yet at the same time she acted as ballast, and was always explaining his jokes; sometimes she was in danger of explaining him entirely away. She loved to tell of his earlier exploits. How often, when younger, he had collected money for charities (particularly for the Deaf and Dumb Cats' League, in which he took special interest), by painting halves of salmon and ships on fire on the cold grey pavement! Armed with an accordion, and masked to the eyes, he had appeared at Eastbourne, and also at the Henley Regatta, as a Mysterious Musician. At the regatta he had been warned off the course, to his great pride and joy. Mrs Mitchell assured Edith that his bath-chair race with a few choice spirits was still talked of at St Leonard's (bath-chairmen, of course, are put in the chairs, and you pull them along). Mr Mitchell was beaten by a short head, but that, Mrs Mitchell declared, was really most unfair, because he was so handicapped—his man was much stouter than any of the others—and the race, by rights, should have been run again.