“Not v—very kind, I’m af—fraid.” She looked at him sideways, and significantly as the fastidious lady would have looked at one of the poets.
“Well, kind enough, I hope,” said the Complete Man. He was delighted with his new acquaintance.
Together they disembogued into the Bayswater Road. It was here, Gumbril reflected, that the Mild and Melancholy one would dumbly have slunk away to his glass of port and his loneliness among the alien topers at the bar. But the Complete Man took his new friend by the elbow, and steered her into the traffic. Together they crossed the road, together entered the park.
“I still think you are v—very impertinent,” said the lady. “What induced you to follow me?”
With a single comprehensive gesture, Gumbril indicated the sun, the sky, the green trees airily glittering, the grass, the emerald lights and violet shadows of the rustic distance. “On a day like this,” he said, “how could I help it?”
“Original sin?”
“Oh,” the Complete Man modestly shook his head, “I lay no claim to originality in this.”
The stranger laughed. This was nearly as good as a young poet at the tea-table. She was very glad that she’d decided, after all, to put on her best suit this afternoon, even if it was a little stuffy for the warmth of the day. He, too, she noticed, was wearing a great-coat; which seemed rather odd.
“Is it original,” he went on, “to go and tumble stupidly like an elephant into a pitfall, head over ears, at first sight...?”
She looked at him sideways, then closed down the magnolia petals, and smiled. This was going to be the real thing—one of those long, those interminable, or, at any rate, indefinitely renewable conversations about love; witty, subtle, penetrating and bold, like the conversations in books, like the conversations across the tea-table between brilliant young poets and ladies of quality, grown fastidious through an excessive experience, fastidious and a little weary, but still, in their subtle way, insatiably curious.