“Darling Michael, I love you dreadfully, but I really should not pay the least little tiny bit of attention to you—or anybody else, if that’s any consolation,” she added. “As it happens, I’ve never yet met anybody with whom I’d care to drive about in a hansom at eleven o’clock, but if I did, three o’clock in the morning would be the same as three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Stella, you ought not to talk like that,” Michael said earnestly. “You don’t realize what people would suppose. And really I don’t think you ought to practise in your nightgown.”
“Oh, Michael, if I practised in my chemise, I shouldn’t expect you to mind.”
“Stella! Really, you know!”
“Listen,” she said, swinging away from him back to the keyboard. “This is the Lily Sonata.”
Michael listened, and as he listened he could not help owning to himself that in her white nightgown, straight-backed against the shimmering ebony instrument, little indeed would matter very much among those dancing black and white notes.
“Or in nothing at all,” said Stella, stopping suddenly.
Then she ran across to Michael and, after kissing him on the top of his head, waltzed very slowly out of the room.
But not even Stella could for long take away from Michael the torment of Lily’s withheld presence. As a month went by, the image of her gained in elusive beauty, and the desire to see became a madness. He tried to evade his promise by haunting the places she would be likely to frequent, but he never saw her. He wondered if she could be in London, and he nearly wrote to ask. There was no consolation to be gained from books; there was no sentiment to be culled from the spots they had known together. He wanted herself, her fragility, her swooning kisses, herself, herself. She was the consummation of idyllic life, the life he longed for, the passionate life of beauty expressed in her. Stella had her music; Alan had his cricket; Mrs. Ross had her son; and he must have Lily. How damnable were these silver nights of June, how their fragrance musk-like even here in London fretted him with the imagination of wasted beauty. These summer nights demanded love; they enraged him with their uselessness.
“Isn’t Chopin wonderful?” cried Stella. “Just when the window-boxes are dripping and the earth’s warm and damp and the air is all turning into velvet.”