“I think you must be a successful writer.”
“You touch the point,” he said slowly. “I am not. I am hungry and probably houseless. And worse than that, I find hunger and houselessness are sordid, tame. The taste of them in the mouth is flat, like stale beer. It is not like the bitter tang of a new experience, but like something the world shows its weariness of in me.”
The amused smile vanished in large-eyed surprise, and something more than surprise, as if his words gave her some intimate, personal information.
“You say strange things in a very strange way. And you came in by an accident?”
“And an impulse?”
“I don't understand. But you must sit down, and I can find you more to eat, if this isn't enough.”
Noel could not have explained the strangeness of his language, if it was strange, further than that he felt the need of saying something in order to find an opportunity of saying something to the point, and so digplayed whatever came to his mind as likely to arrest attention. It was a critical lesson in vagabondage, as familiar there as hunger and houselessness. He attacked the cold meat, cakes and fruit with fervor, and the claret in the decanter. But what should be the next step in the pursuit of fortune? At this point should there not come some revelation?
The lady did not seem to think so, but sat looking now at Noel and now at her own white hands in her lap. That she should have youth and beauty seemed to Noel as native to the issue as her jewels, the heavy curtains, the silver and glass. As for youth, she might be twenty, twenty-one, two. All such ages, he observed to himself with a mental flourish, were one in beauty. It was not a rosy loveliness like the claret in the decanter, nor plump like the fruit in the silver basket, but dark-eyed, white and slender, with black hair drawn across the temples; of a fragile delicacy like the snowflakes, the frost flower of the century's culture, the symbol of its ultimate luxury. The rich room was her setting. She was the center and reason for it, and the yellow point of a diamond over her heart, glittering, but with a certain mellowness, was still more central, intimate, interpretative, symbolic of all desirable things. He began to see the story in it, to glow with the idea.
“Madam,” he said, “I am a writer of whose importance I have not as yet been able to persuade the public. The way I should naturally have gone to-night seemed to me something to avoid. I took another, which brought me here. The charm of existence—” She seemed curiously attentive. “The charm of existence is the unforeseen, and of all things our moods are the most unforeseen. One's plans are not always and altogether futile. If you propose to have salad for lunch, and see your way to it, it is not so improbable that you will have salad for lunch. But if you prefigure how it will all seem to you at lunch, you are never quite right. Man proposes and God disposes. I add that there is a third and final disposal, namely, what man is to think of the disposition after it is made. I hope, since you proposed or prefigured to-night, perhaps as I did, something different from this—this disposition”—he lifted his glass of claret between him and the light—“that your disposition what to think of it is, perhaps, something like mine.”
The lady was leaning forward with parted lips, listening intently, absorbed in his words. For the life of him Noel could not see why she should be absorbed in his words, but the fact filled him with happy pride.