The doors of the conservatory at the end of the hall stood invitingly open, and a cool, fragrant waft of perfume came through them. Without further deliberation, we mutely accepted their invitation, and finding, by the dim, parti-coloured light of Chinese lanterns, that two armchairs had been placed at the further end, we immediately took possession of them.
“Occasionally rest is vouchsafed even to the wicked,” said Nugent, leaning back, and picking up my fan, which I had laid on the floor, and beginning lazily to examine it. “Looking at a ball in the abstract, I think it involves great weariness and vexation of spirit. Out of twenty-four dances, there are at most four or five that one really looks forward to. You are going to stay for No. 18, you know,” he added quietly. “I shall settle that with the Madam.”
“Give me my fan, please,” I said, taking no notice of this assertion. “I can see you know just the right way to break it.”
He sat up, and, instead of returning it, began slowly to fan me. There was a brief silence. The rain pattered down on the glass overhead. We could just hear the music, and the measured stamping of the dancers’ feet.
“Do you know,” he said suddenly, “you are curiously different from what I expected you to be.”
“Why? Had you formed any definite idea about me?”
“Not in the least. That was what threw me so out of my reckoning. I thought I knew pretty well, in a general way, what you were going to be like; but somehow you have made me reconstruct all my notions.”
“If you had only told me in time, I should have tried to be less inconsiderate. It is so painful to have to give up one’s ideas.”
“I did not find it so,” he said seriously; “on the contrary. I wonder”—continuing to flap my big black fan to and fro—“if you ever had a kind of latent ideal—a sort of thing which seems so impossible that you never try to form any very concrete theory about it? I suppose it very seldom happens to a man to find that an idea he has only dreamt about is a real thing after all. Can you imagine what an effect it would have upon him when he found that he had unexpectedly met his—well, his ideal?”
He folded up the fan, and looked down at me, waiting for an answer.