“A marvellous, an incomparable type!” he said, looking at Silvia, and back again at her mother. “Who has had the felicity, the difficult felicity, of painting that glorious head? No one? I am astonished. I would be shocked if I were capable of so bourgeois an emotion. H’m!”
Beyond a visit to the private view of the Royal Academy, Mrs. Wardour had not penetrated into pictorial circles, and faintly, through the impression, volubly audible, of Silvia and Nellie talking together, Peter heard his father leading up to the series of war-cartoons suitable for mural decoration. As regards that, he went walking in the wet woods, as aloof from his father as from any other magnificent self-advertiser. He had heard Mrs. Wardour’s promise to go to the studio next day and to bring Silvia, and he thought that very probably the relations of Great Britain with foreign countries might struggle through a free hour without his co-operation. Meantime Nellie seemed to be talking secrets to Silvia, and he sat, nursing his knee, a little aloof from either group. Presently Nellie would go back to her seat in the stalls, and his father would do the same, and then he would hitch his chair a little forward again....
People began to troop back into the stalls; obviously a bell had rung announcing the imminence of the second act. Nellie recognized that, and got up. As yet she had barely spoken to him.
“I must get back to my Philip,” she said very properly. “Good night, darling Silvia.”
Peter had gone to open the door for them.
“Come to the flat, Peter,” she said, without turning her head, as she passed him. “I shall go straight home.”
The words were just dropped from her, as if by accident or inadvertence, but the moment she had spoken them she knew that this had been in the main the object of her visit to the box: it was this which she had primarily wanted. The merest hint of an affirmative nod on Peter’s part was sufficient answer.
The play came to its happy concluding treacliness, and they went out. Philip and Nellie, of course, were among the first into the vestibule, where he instantly caught his footman’s eye. The Wardour group must have left their box slightly before the end, for Peter was seeing them into their motor, thanking Mrs. Wardour for “such an awfully nice evening” and excusing himself from being given a lift, as after a day in the office he liked walking home—yes, all the way to South Kensington. How nice it would be to see Mrs. Wardour at his father’s house next day.... He lingered a moment on the pavement, and as Nellie passed him on her way to the motor, just nodded again, without seeming to see her.
Philip’s first concern, as they slid off into the traffic, was that there should be air, but no draught for Nellie. Perhaps if he put her window quite up and his half down.... Was that comfortable? And a match for her cigarette? After which he slipped her hand into his, and after a moment’s delay she returned the pressure.
In a flash of general, comprehensive consciousness Nellie was aware how comfortable and well-ordered the whole evening had been, and realized that all days, evenings and mornings and afternoons alike, would to the end of life, owing to the very ample “settlements” which she understood to have been made, be padded and cushioned like this. She was conscious at the same moment that her appreciation of that lacked acuteness; she would just as soon, to take an example, be walking with Peter along the pavements, where nobody cared if she felt a draught or not, as be having it all her own way in unjostled progress.... The flash of this perception was instantaneous, measured only by that moment’s delay in response to Philip’s hand, for he instantly began to tick again, as she put it to herself, a pleasant tick, a good, reliable, firm tick.