“To lunch at the Blue Tea Room?” she cried. “Why, Mr. Bromley, so am I! That’s just where I was going. Isn’t that queer? Why, we can have lunch together.”
The hopeful gleam passed out of Mr. Bromley’s expression, though perhaps the bright eyes looking up at him so eagerly were able to interpret his gloom as merely the thoughtfulness habitual to a scholar. His was not a practical mind; he had no thought that Cornelia’s lunching with him might have any result save to spoil the cozy hour he had planned for himself with his book as a table companion. To him she was one of the hundred pupils at the school—a little girl who had lately developed odd mannerisms and airy affectations, for no reason except that many little girls seemed to pass through such phases—and so far as his interest in her as an individual human being was concerned, Cornelia might as well have been eight years old as sixteen. He saw nothing, except that he would have to listen to her instead of reading his book, for, since she meant to lunch at the Blue Tea Room, she would probably talk to him anyhow, whether they sat at the same table or not.
“Ah—if such be the case, very well,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Very well, Miss Cromwell.” Then he added hastily, “I mean to say”—and paused hoping to think of something that might avoid the proposed tête-à-tête; but he failed. “I mean to say—ah—if you wish, Miss Cromwell.”
“Do I!” she exclaimed, breathlessly; but the radiant face she showed him only gave him the idea that she was probably excited by the prospect of waffles.
Yet, when waffles—the Blue Tea Room’s specialty—were placed, as a second course, upon the small blue-and-white painted table between her and Mr. Bromley, Cornelia showed no avidity for them. She had resumed her elegant manner, and but toyed with the food. Her elegance, indeed, was almost oppressive to her companion;—she told the blue-aproned waitress, whose cultivation was betokened by horn-rimmed spectacles, that forgetting to bring butter was a “dreadful baw.” She said “baw” as frequently as she could, in fact; and she appeared to view the people at the other tables through a frigid though invisible lorgnette.
Her disdain of them as plebeians, beings unknown and not to be known, was visible in her expression;—so much so that it made Mr. Bromley uncomfortable; and here was a small miracle in its way; for in reality she did not see the other people in the room at all distinctly. They were only blurred planes of far-away colour to her; she was but dimly aware of their outlines, and failed to recognize two of them whom she knew very well.
For Cornelia all life and light centred upon the little painted table at which she sat with Mr. Bromley. The world to her was like a shadowy room at sunset, when through a window a last shaft from the rosy sun illumines one spot alone, making it glorious, and all else dim and formless. Mr. Bromley and she sat together in this golden glow, an aura that shimmered out to nothing all round about them, so that there was no definite background; and for anything more than two or three feet away she was astigmatic.
Elation sweet as music possessed her. She was not only lunching at a restaurant with a Distinguished Man, quite as if she were a prima donna in Paris, but that Distinguished Man was Mr. Bromley—Mr. Bromley himself, pale with studious wisdom, yet manly, and incomparably more exciting than the symbol of him drawn with five lines and a dot upon her mountain. She had sometimes trembled when she looked at that emaciated symbol: What wonder could there be that she became a little too elegant, that her laughter rang a little too loudly, or that she showed herself disdainful of lowly presences in a dim background, now, when she sat facing her Ideal made actual in all his beauty?
Beauty it was, in good faith, to Cornelia, and, so far as she was concerned, Praxiteles, experimenting to improve Mr. Bromley, could only have marred him. There was gray in his hair, but it was not emphasized, since he was an ashen blond; and for Cornelia—unaware of his actual years and content to remain so—he had no age, he had only perfection. So beautiful he was in the rosy light with which she encircled him.
“Aren’t you going to eat your waffles, now you’ve got ’em?” he asked, a little querulously.