“She’s not here. Fluffy called with Mr. Overbridge just after you’d brought her back. They took her out to supper. Desire slept with her last night. I don’t know what plans she’s made for to-day.—Yes, I’ll ask her to call you up.”
Fluffy again! He frowned. Overbridge hadn’t wanted her—that was Fluffy’s doing; she had taken her for protection. He didn’t like to think of Desire’s being put to such uses. He didn’t like to think of her being made a foil to another woman’s ill-conducted love-affair. There was a lack of system about not knowing where you were going to sleep up to within five minutes of getting into bed. He felt chagrined that his imagination had been wasted in picturing her thinking of him. He criticized Vashti for the leniency of her attitude; it was proper, if bonds of affection were worth anything, for a mother and daughter to be together after a three weeks’ separation. For his own lack of consideration in keeping Desire from her mother, there was some excuse; but for Fluffy’s—— The thing that hurt most was that Desire should have been willing to telescope the most exalted moment of his life into the next trivial happening, allowing herself no time for reflection.
All that day he waited with trembling suspense to hear from her; it was not until the following morning that she called him and arranged to go to lunch. Almost her first words on meeting were, “I’ve thought it over.”
“Over! Was there anything?”
“Thieves must be punished. You mustn’t do it again.” Then, with a quick uplifting of her eyes—so quick that the gray seas seemed to splash over: “Come, Meester Deek, let’s forget and be happy.”
So he learnt that it was he who had done wrong—he who had to be forgiven. Her forgiveness was offered so generously that it would have been churlish to dispute its necessity. Besides, argument wasted time and might lead to fretfulness.
In the weeks that followed a dangerous comradeship sprang up between them; dangerous because of its quiet confidence, which seemed to deny the existence of passion. Her total ignoring of the fact of sex made any reference to it seem vulgar; yet everything that she did, from the itinerant beauty-patch to the graceful frailty of her dress, was a silent and provocative acknowledgment that sex was omnipresent.
“I wouldn’t dare to trust myself so much with any other man,” she told him.
It was what Vashti had said: “Oh, no, I didn’t mind; but I should have if it had been any one but Teddy.”
So he found himself isolated on a peak of chivalry, from which the old sweet ways of love looked satyrish. Other men would have tried to hold her hands. Given his opportunities, other men would have crushed their lips against her sweet red mouth. Because she had proclaimed him nobler than other men he refrained from any of these brutalities—and all the while his mind was on fire with the vision of them. Instead, he put the poetry of his passion into the parables of love that he told her. They were like children in a forest, hiding from each other, yet continually calling and making known their whereabouts out of fear of the forest’s solitariness.