“It was so good of you to ask me here,” he said, “quietly, like this; for it means that you admit me again to friendship and intimacy with you—at least, so I take it.”
He struck a match to light his cigarette, holding it in the screen of his hollowed hands, so that the flame illuminated his face very vividly. He had changed extraordinarily little: his dark eyes still had the sparkle of fire and youth in them, and their corners were still unseamed and unwrinkled. His face had grown neither stout nor attenuated; his hair was still untouched by grey, and a plume of it hung, as she had always remembered it, a little apart and over his forehead. He wore neither moustache nor beard, and a very short upper lip separated his large and essentially masculine mouth from a thin, aquiline nose. Then, as he flicked his match away, he threw back his head with the gesture she knew so well.
“Or is that presumptuous of me?” he asked. “I charge you to tell me that, and not let me go on being presumptuous unwittingly.”
She laughed.
“It is not in the least presumptuous,” she said. “I ask the whole world to a ball or a big party, since it does not matter who is there, owing to the crowd. But here in the country I ask only the people I want to see, or for some reason have got to see—you are not among the latter—and the more one wants to see of them, the smaller is the party.”
“You encourage me,” he said. “It is kind of you. Now, my dear lady, we have not seen each other for some time, and though old history is tiresome, I do want to know one thing. Never mind the history, the events, but sum it up for me. Are you happy? Have you been happy?”
She paused a moment. He had a right to know that too.
“Yes, immensely happy,” she said with all honestness—“at least, my life suits me, which, I suppose, implies happiness. I am—what is the cant phrase?—in harmony with my environment. And—and you?”
The moment she had asked it she questioned her wisdom in doing so. It gave him, if he chose, a sort of opportunity.
“Ah, well, I have been hard-working and ambitious,” he said, “and I have got what I wanted. I suppose one should be content with that. Diplomacy suits me; London suits me; a third thing, indeed, suits me.”