The second act was drawing to an end when they stole into their box. On the stage there was proceeding the most elementary of muddles, to which it was not in the least worth while to devote any ingenuity. It was clear at the first glance that these people who pretended to be servants were really landed gentry, and that just before the end the Earl (who had taken the house) would propose to the cook and be violently accepted. Psychologically they presented no point of interest. Far more engrossing to Nellie was the fact that she had got Peter with her, and the pleasure of that and the general problem it propounded was far more absorbing. Marriage had certainly quickened her emotional perceptions, and she inferred, from the extraordinary delight that it was to be with him again, how much in the interval she had missed him. She had no reason to complain, either, of the welcome he had given her, but it was manifest (how she could not definitely have said) that the quality of that was different from hers to him. To his sense, as he had openly stated, they had taken up the old attitude, the old intimacy, without break, but as she thought over that in the few minutes that elapsed before the act was finished, she found that, for her part, she did not altogether endorse his view. Certainly the old intimacy was there, firm and unshaken, but somehow, hovering over it, like a mist which to her eyes seemed to be luminous with tears, there was some new atmospheric condition, sunny and tremulous.
Peter turned to her as the house sprang into light again.
“Oh, what a waste of time,” he said. “We should have done much better to have left our elbows on the table. We’re always doing it too. Do you remember the last play at which we met? That time you were with Philip and I with Silvia and Mrs. Wardour. Then we had our talk afterwards; to-night we had it first. I like the other plan best.”
Though Peter had here stated several things with which she was in cordial agreement, his tone was not in tune with the old footing, the old intimacy. Not many minutes ago it had been she who, in opposition to his inclination, had insisted on breaking their tête-à-tête; now, with all possible lightness of touch, she suggested its resumption.
“I’ve seen enough,” she said. “I can tell Philip all about it. Let’s go back, my dear, and have half an hour’s more talk. It was my fault that we broke up; but how could I have told that the play would have been as silly as this? We shall talk more sense in five minutes than they’ll put into the whole of the next act.”
Peter’s eyes were wandering round the house. At this moment they were attracted by a feather fan violently signalling from a box directly opposite, and the general buzz of the theatre was quite distinctly pierced with a shrill scream of laughter which came from precisely the same direction as the gesticulating fan. It was hardly necessary to put up his glasses to ascertain the authorship of these phenomena.
“Mrs. Trentham,” he said unerringly, “with the usual myrmidons. She has seen us, Nellie. Come round and be conventional.”
“Oh, why?” said she. “If she wants to see us she can come here, can’t she? But she doesn’t want to see us: she only wants to be seen.”
She felt that at that moment she was becoming, to Peter, part of the general foreground, a prominent object in it, but still only part of it. His next words confirmed the impression.
“Oh, come along,” he said. “Let’s embark on the ordinary ridiculous evening. Let’s all go back to supper with me. Or perhaps there’s a dance going on. Come round and forage, Nellie. I’ve been in the country for a month, you know. Besides——”