"Oh yes! The Opening! How perfectly splendid!" Tiny bubbles showed between her glorious lips. "What a shame it is poor Lois isn't able to go!"
"Yes," said George. "But look here! Don't you go and tell her so. That's quite the wrong tack."
"
I see! I see!" said Mrs. Buck, gazing at him as one who was capable of subtle comprehensions. "By the way," she added, as she turned to mount the steps, "I ran across Everard Lucas at the Berkeley to-day. Lunching there. I said I was coming here. He told me to tell you, if I saw you, that old Mr. Haim or Home or some such name was dead. He said you'd be interested."
"By Jove!" George ejaculated. "Is he? Haven't seen him for years and years."
II
He got into his car and drove off at speed. Beneath his off-hand words to Mrs. Buckingham Smith he was conscious of a quickly growing, tender sympathy for Marguerite Haim. The hardness in him was dissolved almost instantaneously. He saw Marguerite, who had been adamantine in the difference which separated them, as the image of pliancy, sweetness, altruism, and devotion; and he saw her lips and the rapt glance of her eyes as beautiful as in the past. What a soft, soothing, assuaging contrast with the difficult Lois, so imperious and egoistic! (An unforgettable phrase of Lois's had inhabited his mind for over a decade: "Fancy quarrelling over a man!") He had never met Marguerite since their separation, and for years he had heard nothing whatever about her; he did not under-estimate the ordeal of meeting her again. Yet he at once decided that he must meet her again. He simply could not ignore her in her bereavement and new loneliness. To write to her would be absurd; it would be a cowardly evasion; moreover, he could not frame a letter. He must prove to her and to himself that he had a sense of decent kindliness which would rise above conventional trifles when occasion demanded.
At the top of Elm Park Gardens, instead of turning east towards Piccadilly he turned west in the direction of the Workhouse tower. And thus he exposed the unreality of the grandiose pleas with which professional men impose on their wives and on themselves. A few minutes earlier his appointment at the club (not Pickering's, to which, however, he still belonged, but a much greater institution, the Artists, in Albemarle Street) had been an affair of extreme importance, upon which might depend his future career, for did it not concern negotiations for a London factory, which was to be revolutionary in design, and to cost £150,000, and which,
erected, would form a permanent advertisement of the genius of George Cannon? Now he remembered that Sir Isaac Davids, the patron of all the arts and the influencer of commissions, had said that he would probably but not certainly be at the club that afternoon, and he argued that in any event half an hour sooner or later would not make or mar the business. Indeed, he went further, and persuaded himself that between that moment and dinner he had nothing to do except sign a few routine letters at the office. Still, it was just as well that Lois should remain in delusion as to his being seriously pressed for time.
As he curved, slackening and accelerating, with the perfect assurance of long habit, through the swift, intricate, towering motor traffic of Fulham Road, it was inevitable that he should recall the days, eleven years ago, when through a sedate traffic of trotting horses enlivened with a few motors and motor-buses, he used to run down on his motor-cycle to visit Marguerite. It was inevitable that he should think upon what had happened to him in the meantime. His body felt, honestly, no older. The shoulders had broadened, the moustache was fiercer, there were semicircular furrows under the eyes; but he was as slim and agile as ever, and did his morning exercises as regularly as he took his bath. More, he was still, somehow, the youthful prodigy who had won the biggest competition of modern years while almost an infant. He was still known as such, regarded as such, greeted as such, referred to as such at intervals in the Press. His fame in his own world seemed not to have deteriorated. But disappointment had slowly, imperceptibly, eaten into him. He was far off the sublime heights of Sir Hugh Corver, though he met Sir Hugh apparently as an equal on the Council of the Royal Society of British Architects. Work had not surged in upon him. He had not been able to pick and choose among commissions. He had never won another competition. Again and again his hopes had been horribly defeated in these ghastly enterprises, of which two were still pending. He was a man of one job. And a quarter of his professional life had slipped behind him! His dreams were changed. Formerly he had dreamed in architectural forms; now he dreamed in percentages. His one job had been enormous and lucrative, but he had lived on it for a decade, and it was done. And outside it he had earned probably less than twelve hundred pounds.