“I mean that when I’m so reasonable, you must try to be reasonable on your side.”
“Well, I will.”
As they drew up in front of the New Netherlands Club, he escaped without committing himself further.
If he dined with a bachelor friend that night he must have cut the evening short, for at half past nine he re-entered the back drawing-room where Letty was sitting before the fire, her red book in her lap. She sat as a lover stands at a tryst as to which there is no positive engagement. To fortify herself against disappointment she had been trying to persuade herself that he wouldn’t come, and that she didn’t expect him.
He came, but he came as a man who has something on his mind. Almost without greeting he sat down, took the book from her lap and proceeded to look up the place at which he had left off.
“Miss Walbrook’s lovely, isn’t she?” she said, before he had found the page.
“She’s a very fine woman,” he assented. “Do you remember where we stopped?”
“It was at, ‘So let it be, said the little mermaid, turning pale as death.’ You know her very well, don’t you?”
“Oh, very well indeed. I think we begin here: ‘But you will have to pay me also––’”