Maisie pretended to pout. "You're like all the rest of them; you come to see me and do nothing but talk of her. I'd have hidden her in the attic long ago, only she's by Sargent. She's too beautiful for hiding, and then no one can afford to hide her Sargent under a bushel in these hard times."
"And still you've not told me," Tabs reproached her.
III
"Wouldn't we be more comfortable sitting down?" Maisie slid between the couch and the tea-table, making herself comfortable against a pile of cushions. When Tabs looked round for a seat, he discovered the strategy of the arrangement of the furniture.
The nearest available chair to Maisie was at least four yards away; to have selected it would have been to have isolated himself. He would have had to have hailed her ridiculously across the room's breadth. It was plainly intended that he should challenge fate and share the couch, just as Pollock, Gervis, Lockwood, Adair and so many others had done before him.
All this friendliness would make it a little difficult for him presently when he broached the subject of Adair. He had an uneasy feeling that Sir Tobias wouldn't approve of this way of conducting his mission. It was one thing to fly the white flag of truce while you parleyed with the enemy; it was quite another to share the same couch with her in a cozy room, where there were only the two of you and the jumping flames of the fire in the grate made the silver on the small round table glow red. When they weren't talking there was no sound. None of the clamor of London reached them. They might have been in a cave, far removed from everything that disturbed. And, indeed, the little piled-up rockery outside the windows, with the spring flowers blowing and the baby lake, with the toy-boat drifting on its quiet surface, rather created the illusion that this was a cave.
A restful lethargy of kindness was creeping over him. He didn't want to be at enmity with anybody, least of all with this dainty sprite of a woman with the cornflower eyes and the flaxen hair. He no longer wondered that three men in succession, weary of the mud of fighting, had come to her for rest. He could
even comprehend Adair's treachery, if it had gone so far as treachery. Adair had found his wife fretful—she had always been crying and hanging round his neck. Here he had found companionship, secret laughter and forgetfulness. The world owed any woman a large debt of liberty who could give men that. Maisie was the kind of woman who could bury twenty husbands and go out next morning to meet the twenty-first. What was far more amazing, she could do it without frivolity or loss of self-respect. She lived a day at a time. She made you feel, the moment you met her, that that was the only tolerable way of living. The excuse for her philosophy was its success. She was an expert in happiness—so expert that she could communicate her secret without waste of words. Probably for most men words were not necessary; for them their happiness was herself.
From her end of the couch Maisie smiled at Tabs dreamily. "You're persistent when you want anything. I suppose you always get your desires?"
"The little things, yes," he replied. "But the big things—they evade me."