I had been wanting her badly, but when I saw her, so bright and beautiful, looking as if she were the joy of life made incarnate, I should have liked to strike her hard, first on one cheek and then the other, deepening the rose to crimson, and leaving an ugly red mark for each finger.
“Have you a headache, dear?” she asked, in that velvet voice she keeps for me—as if I were a thing only fit for pity and protection.
“It’s my heart,” said I. “It feels like a clock running down. Oh, I wish I could die, and end it all! What’s the good of me—to myself or anyone?”
“Don’t talk like that, my poor one,” she said. “Shall I take you upstairs to your own room?”
“No, I think I should faint if I had to go upstairs,” I answered. “Yet I can’t stay here. What shall I do?”
“What about Uncle Eric’s study?” Di asked. She always calls Lord Mountstuart ‘Uncle Eric,’ though he isn’t her uncle. Her mother and his wife were sisters, that’s all: and then there was the other sister who married the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a cousin of Lord Mountstuart’s. That family seemed to have a craze for American girls; but Lord Mountstuart makes an exception of me. He’s civil, of course, because he’s an abject slave of Di’s, and she refused to come and pay a visit in England without me: but I give him the shivers, I know very well: and I take an impish joy in making him jump.
“I’m sure he won’t be there this evening,” Di went on, when I hesitated. “He’s playing bridge with a lot of dear old boys in the library, or was, half an hour ago. Come, let me help you there. It’s only a step.”
She put her pretty arm round my waist, and leaning on her I walked across the room, out into a corridor, through a tiny “bookroom” where odd volumes and old magazines are kept, into Lord Mountstuart’s study.
It is a nice room, which he uses much as his wife uses her boudoir. The library next door is rather a show place, but the study has only Lord Mountstuart’s favourite books in it. He writes there (he has written a novel or two, and thinks himself literary), and some pictures he has painted in different parts of the world hang on the walls: for he also fancies himself artistic.
In one corner is a particularly comfortable, cushiony lounge where, I suppose, the distinguished author lies and thinks out his subjects, or dreams them out. And it was to this that Di led me.