“Well,” said Mr. Parkins, “I will. I’ll try him, because I think it’s a shame a man like that should be so hard pressed, but I know I’m making a mistake. You can write Blair that if he wants to come I’ll give him twenty-five hundred a year on a year’s trial.”
An odd spasm contracted Stacey’s features, but passed at once. “Oh, but I say,” he protested, in a dead emotionless voice, “you were giving me four thousand before the war!”
Mr. Parkins shook his head. “I’ll make it three thousand, but not a cent beyond,” he said firmly. “Philip Blair’s a genius. A genius isn’t worth more than three thousand to me.”
Stacey laughed. “I like the implication,” he observed.
So he added a postscript to his letter and sent it off to Phil.
At three-thirty precisely Stacey was at Marian’s house. He knew he had a problem to face, since it was unfortunately true that he had no love left for Marian and did not desire to marry either her or any one else. But he had no plan and he had not said to himself that he would not marry her. He had not said anything at all to himself. He merely went to her house as per schedule. All that he felt was a sense of something burdensome—and just a little faint curiosity. After all, he had loved this girl once upon a time. That was it. “Once upon a time” exactly expressed it. It was the way you began fairy-tales.
He was relieved, if so slender an emotion can be called relief, that it was not Marian who opened the door of the house to him. He had been a little afraid that Marian herself would welcome him with an impetuous rush. But the door was opened by a maid—and not even the one the Latimers had had in the old days, at which also Stacey somehow felt relief.
He went into the drawing-room, hoping to find Mrs. Latimer there; for, besides feeling that her presence would put off the demand for emotional moments, he really did want to see her. But she was not there. The room was empty.
He went over and stood with his back to the fire-place and looked around him, an odd smile drawing at one corner of his mouth. For again he was feeling the weak futile tug of old discarded emotions. These vases and chairs and statuettes, the whole familiar setting of the room, reminded him of what he had once felt in their presence; which is the same as saying: what he had once been. Stacey was like a boat floating on the water, almost solitary, almost loose, but not quite; still attached by a frayed cord or two to his old self.
But the portières at one end of the room were parted gently, and Marian stood between them.