Steptoe replied that he did understand, and having put up the receiver he pondered.
What could it mean? What could be back of it? How would this unsophisticated girl meet so skilful an antagonist. That Miss Walbrook was coming as an antagonist he had no doubt. In his own occasional 188 meetings with her she had always been a superior, a commander, to whom even he, ’Enery Steptoe, had been a servitor requiring no further consideration. With so gentle an opponent as madam she would order and be obeyed.
At the same time he could not alarm madam, or allow her to shirk the encounter. She had that in her, he was sure, which couldn’t but win out, however much she might be at a disadvantage. His part would be to reduce her disadvantages to a minimum, allowing her strong points to tell. Her strong points, he reckoned, were innocence, an absence of self-consciousness, and, to the worldly-wise, a disconcerting candor. Steptoe analyzed in the spirit and not verbally; but he analyzed.
For Letty the morning had been feverish, chiefly because of her uncertainty. Was it the wish of the prince that she should go, or was it not? If it was his wish, why had he not let her? If, on the other hand, he desired her to stay, what did he mean to do with her? He had passed her on the way out to breakfast at the Club—she had been standing in the hall—and he had smiled.
What was the significance of that smile? She sat down in the library to think. She sat down in the chair she had occupied while he lay on the couch, and reconstructed that scene which now, for all her life, would thrill her with emotional memories. There he had lain, his head on the very indentation which the cushion still bore, his feet here, where she had pressed her lips to them. She had actually had her hand on his brow, she had smoothed back his hair, 189 and had hardly noted at the time that such was her extraordinary privilege.
She came back to the fact that he had smiled at her. It would have been an enchanting smile from anyone, but coming from a prince it had all the romantic effulgence with which princes’ smiles are infused. How much of that romantic effulgence came automatically from the prince because he was a prince, and how much of it was inspired by herself? Was any of it inspired by herself? When all was said and done this last was the great question.
It brought her where so many things brought her, to the dream of love at first sight. Could it have happened to him as it had happened to herself? It was so much in her mental order of things that she was far from considering it impossible. Improbable, yes; she would admit as much as that; but impossible, no! To be sure she had been in the old gray rag; but Steptoe had informed her that there were kings who went about falling in love with beggar-maids. She would have loved being one of those beggar-maids; and after all, was she not?
True, there was the other girl; but Letty found it hard to see her as a reality. Besides, she had, in appearance at least, treated him badly. Might it not easily have come about that she, Letty, had caught his heart in the rebound? She quite understood that if the prince had fallen in love with her at first sight, there might be convulsion in his inner self without, as yet, a comprehension on his part of the nature of his passion.
She had reached this point when Steptoe entered the 190 library on one of his endless tasks of re-arranging that which seemed to be in sufficiently good order. Putting the big desk to rights he said over his shoulder:
“Perhaps I’d better tell madam as she’s to ’ave a caller this afternoon.”