Mr. Mercaptan bowed.
“You express so exquisitely what we——” and waving her hand in a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, “what we all only feel and aren’t clever enough to say.”
Mr. Mercaptan was charmed. He got up from before his writing-desk, crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon. “Feeling,” he said, “is the important thing.”
Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked, in blank verse: ‘The things that matter happen in the heart.’
“I quite agree,” she said.
Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr. Mercaptan’s brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie’s hand and kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer.
It was only the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa—a poor, hire-purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr. Mercaptan’s grand affair in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa—lay with her feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings. She was reading the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr. Mercaptan had given her when he said ‘good-bye’ (or rather, ‘À bientôt, mon amie’); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications inscribed on the fly-leaf:
To
BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET,
With Gratitude,