Thick cigarette-smoke made a blue haze above the jumble of odd bits of furniture which we’d picked up second-hand in the Old King’s Road, above the tea-table with its Persian Rose pottery, its plate of Chelsea buns and its green dish of cherries—I hoped there weren’t many stones on the floor!—a haze that half obscured Cicely’s bright head and the figure that reclined, opposite to her, in our comfiest basket-chair. I saw by the unusual garments of it that it must be—yes! Sydney Vandeleur!
Really, I don’t know which of the four of us was least pleased to see the others, while I introduced Mr. Waters to Cicely and said gaily to the men, “I think you’ve met before” ... and forced myself to dissipate the odious pause that followed the insincerely civil greetings by plunging into some sort of conversation.
It was worst for me, I think. I was so utterly taken aback—first, by finding Sydney there at all, and then by wondering what on earth the Governor would think of his being there—and in those clothes!
For Sydney’s latest idea for not being slavishly got-up like every other miserably conventional tailor’s dummy was, apparently, to have his “things” more or less a copy, but an édition de luxe, of a French fisher-boy’s vareuse-blouse and skirt-like trousers; those brown corduroys were of corduroy-velvet at goodness knows what a yard, cut by some master-hand in Savile Row; the very bagginess at the ankles, above the leaf-brown silk socks, had been carefully studied. And the Governor!—who’d once said:
“After all, what’s unusual in dress is wrong, nine times out of ten. Eight times, it’s also hideous.”
He must be positively flabbergasted at this spectacle! I’m more accustomed to those ideas; but even I found it a relief to turn my eyes upon his stereotyped grey suit after that fell and deadly “effectiveness” of Sydney’s....
Posing in his dress like that! Posing, even more shamelessly, in his manner!
For wouldn’t you have thought that anyone who’d been refused by a girl and who then came unexpectedly face to face with that girl and the person for whom he imagines she’s jilted him—wouldn’t you suppose that he would at least behave like a man? Take it without flinching, even if it were fairly unpleasant, and carry it off as if nothing particular had happened? I shall never think the same of Sydney again for not doing that.
Perhaps it served me right for the rather spiteful note I wrote to him just before I went off to The Lawn, but—Need he have committed the solecism of calling me, when I’ve never been anything but “Monica” to him, “Miss Trant” in italics? It was trying! So was the pathetic look which he saw fit to call up into his spanielly brown eyes as he glanced from me to Mr. Waters. (Mask well down there, so I couldn’t guess what he made of this velvet-and-Vandyke apparition.) And the worm-in-the-bud expression which Sydney let steal over the whole of his dreamy, Cavalier’s face as he turned it, in a way that all but said “Ah! You understand what I suffer!” to Cicely——
Cicely, too! Cicely, who’s shared ups and downs with me for the last two years! Even she must needs forsake me, making matters worse by creating a general atmosphere of blight even while she was bringing in two more leadless-glaze cups and plates, and making fresh tea, and by giving an accurate though unspoken impression of what she “understood.”