"Never mind!" she gently laughed. "I shan't be many minutes after you." She pretended to make a mystery. But her sole purpose was to avoid re-entering the house in his company; and she knew that he had divined this. Nevertheless, she found pleasure in the perfectly futile pretence of a mysterious purchase.
She was very self-conscious as they stood there on the dusty footpath amid the promenaders gay and gloomy, chattering and silent, who were taking the sun and the salt breeze. Despite her reason, she had a fear that numbers of people would perceive her to be newly affianced and remark upon the contrast between her girlishness and his maturity. But George Cannon was not in the slightest degree self-conscious. He played the lover with ease and said quite simply and convincingly just the things which she would have expected a lover to say. Indeed, the conversation, as carried on by him, between the moment of betrothal and the arrival at the chemist's shop, was the one phenomenon of the engagement which corresponded with her preconceived ideas concerning such an affair. It convinced her that she really was affianced.
"Well?" he murmured fondly and yet quizzically, as they remained wordless, deliciously hesitating to part. "What are you thinking about?"
She replied with brave candour, appealing to him by a soft glance:
"I was only thinking how queer it is I should be engaged in a room I'd never seen before in my life--going into it like that!"
He looked at her uncomprehending; for an instant his features were blank; then he smiled kindly.
"It's so strange!" she encouraged him.
"Yes. Isn't it?" he agreed, with charming, tranquil politeness.
"He doesn't see it!" she thought, as she watched the play of his face. "He doesn't see how wonderful it is that I should go into a room that was absolutely unknown to me and then this should happen at once. Why! I never knew there was such a room!" She could not define how she was affected by this fact, but she regarded the fact as tremendously romantic, and its effect on her was profound. And George saw in it no significance! She was disconcerted. She felt a tremor; it was as though the entire King's Road had quivered for a fraction of a second and then, feigning nonchalance, resumed its moveless solidity.
Inside the chemist's she demanded the first thing she set eyes on--a tooth-brush. All the while she was examining various shapes of toothbrushes, she had a vision of George raising his hat to take leave of her, and she could see not only the curve of his hand and the whiteness of his cuff, but also the millions of tiny marks and creases on the coarse skin of his face, extraordinarily different from her own smooth, pure, delicate, silky complexion. And she remembered that less than three years ago she had regarded him as of another generation, as indefinitely older and infinitely more experienced than her childish and simple self. This reflection produced in her a consternation which was curiously blissful.