So commonplace their greeting; so utterly inadequate to express the prodigious flutterings of his heart! They should have met alone in some solitary forest, when all the colours of the world were rushing to the clouds, in the hours of the sunset. He could have led her to a resting-place of moss and fern, and whispered to her all the thoughts that were in his mind....
But here in the world of everyday, what romance could survive the prosy clamour of it all. There was nothing to say but "Good-morning," and halting, nervous things about the weather, and the theatre, and each other's work. Anything of deeper import must be told by sighs and silences.
And thus, they parted again, after their lunch in a dingy Italian restaurant in the Strand, he with all his longings unfulfilled, and with a deeper sense of something that had been lacking in his life. Why could he not have told her all that he had felt? Why was it necessary for him to mask and screen his emotions with absurd talk that only seemed to waste precious opportunities? She rose before him in his imagination, amazingly distinct and real, no longer a shadow, but a real person. He conjured her presence at will before him, and she appeared as he liked to see her best, with her eyes grey and thoughtful, and the sunlight gilding her hair where it swept up from her white brow. Thus, when she was not there, he lived with her, and told her all the things he dared not say to her.
And nobody knew of these exquisite moments but himself. To mention her to Beaver, now, would be sacrilege. There was but one man who, he thought, would understand what was passing through him, and that was Wratten, who was away on his honeymoon.
They met several times during the next few weeks; it seemed to him that she would not consent to meet him if her heart did not echo his own. And yet, she gave no sign. There was always an air of chastened constraint about them both. He helped her adjust her fluffy feather boa once, and his hand brushed her cheek, and he remembered the feel of it, smooth and soft, like the touch of the downy skin of a peach.
All the time, of course, in the intervals of these meetings, there was the same breathless round of work to be done. Sometimes he would have to cancel their arrangements because he was given an assignment just at the very hour they had set apart for themselves—it was done by a hurried scrawl on office paper—"Dear Miss Filmer, I'm so sorry," and so forth. Once he had written "Dearest," but he tore it up, fearing he might lose her for ever. He could not risk offending her. He knew that she was rigorously strict in certain conventions.
"I say ... may I call you Lilian?" he had asked one day, and she had glanced at him with a stricken look, and said, "Oh—please, please don't, Mr Quain." She had even laid her hand upon his, with a persuasive gesture. It was a distinct pat—the sort of pat one bestows when a child is to be coaxed into goodness.
She was very perplexing.
Her manner could alter in the most unexpected and unaccountable manner. One day she might be quite gay, and he would feel that now it was merely a question of moments before he could storm her heart and carry it: and the next time he saw her she would be strangely distant, as though she regretted the progress they had made. Or else, she would be provokingly casual, and wound him deliberately in his weakest spot. She would call him a boy, with a little smile and play of the eyebrows. Ah! that rankled more than anything she said or did, for the whole happiness of his life depended on his being taken seriously, and at his own valuation—and he valued himself as a man of the world, with the experience of double his years.