Good manners wasted!
For Leslie, as she afterwards told her chum, took for her motto upon such occasions, "And if the others see, what matter they?"
Her partner seemed oblivious that there were any "others" sitting in the shadows. The couple passed, leaving upon the night-breeze a trail of cigarette-smoke (Leslie's), and an indistinguishable growl, presumably from the Black Panther.
Leslie's voice floated back, "Not in the mood. Besides! You had, last time, 'to soften the edges,' as you call it."
More audibly her partner grumbled, "What's a kiss you've had? About as satisfying as last summer's strawberry-ice——"
A mere nothing—the incident.
Yet it brought (or hastened) a change into the atmosphere of that arbour where, under the giant glowworms of lights swinging above them, two young people sat at ease together without speaking.
For Gwenna, envious, thought, "Leslie can make a man think of nothing but her, even when she's 'not in the mood!' I can't. Yet I believe I could, but for one thing. Even now I don't know that he isn't thinking about That Other——"
"That Other" was her rival, that machine of his that Gwenna had not mentioned all the evening....
It had come, she knew, that duel between the Girl and the Aeroplane for the first place in the heart of a Flying Man. A duel as old as the world, between the thing a man greatly loves, and that which he loves more greatly still. She thought of Lovelace who "loved Honour more." She thought of the cold Sea that robs the patient, warm-hearted women ashore, of the icy Pole whose magnetism drew men from their wives. The work that drew the thoughts of her Airman was that Invention that was known already as his Fiancée....