“I want to believe you,” she said softly; “but it seems so strange. I am no actress like Adelaide Robinson; I am afraid that if I accept your offer, I may hurt the play. She is popular, and I am unknown.”
“She has talent,” he said, “and experience; you have genius, which is far above either. I am not leaving you any choice at all. To-morrow I shall bring the play.”
“You may at least do that,” she answered. “It will be a pleasure to hear it read. Come to luncheon, and we will have a long afternoon.”
Matravers took his leave with a sense of relief. Their farewell had been cordial enough, but unemotional. Yet even he, ignorant of women and their ways as he was, was conscious that they had entered together upon a new phase of their knowledge of each other. The touch of their fingers, the few conventional words which passed between them, as she leaned over the staircase watching him descend, seemed to him to savour somehow of mockery. He passed out from her presence into the cool, soft night, dazed, not a little bewildered at this new strong sense of living, which had set his pulses beating to music and sent his blood rushing through his body with a new sweetness. Yet with it all he was distressed and unhappy. He was confronted with the one great influence of life against which he had deliberately set his face.
CHAPTER VIII
Matravers began to find himself, for the first time in his life, seriously attracted by a woman. He realized it in some measure as he walked homeward in the early morning, after this last interview with Berenice; he knew it for an absolute fact on the following evening as he walked through the crowded streets back to his rooms with the manuscript of the play which he had been reading to her in his pocket. He felt himself moving in what was to some extent an unreal atmosphere. His senses were tingling with the excitement of the last few hours—for the first time he knew the full fascination of a woman’s intellectual sympathy. He had gone to his task wholly devoid of any pleasurable anticipation. It spoke much for the woman’s tact that before he had read half a dozen pages he was not only completely at his ease, but was experiencing a new and very pleasurable sensation. The memory of it was with him now—he had no mind to disturb it by any vague alarm as to the future of their relationship.
In Piccadilly he met Fergusson, who turned and walked with him.
“I have been to your rooms, Matravers,” the actor said. “I want to know whether you have arranged with your friend?”