He shook his head.
“Your name is very precious to me,” he said, not without a hint of emotion, “very precious, Heloise. I feel that, although the Ostend season is past and most of the hotels are closed and visitors have dispersed, as I understand they do disperse from fashionable seaside resorts, there is a possibility, a bare possibility, that we should see somebody there who knew me—us, I mean—and who would put the worst possible construction upon what—er—would be the most innocent intellectual recreation. It is extremely dangerous.”
She was laughing hardly as she rose.
“I see,” she said. “You are really conventional underneath, Gordon. It was a mad idea—don’t let us talk any more about it. It hurts me a little.”
In silence he paid the bill, in silence followed her into his car. He was hurt too. Nobody had ever called him conventional. Half way across Richmond Park he said:
“We will go: let us say no more. I will meet you as we arranged.”
The only answer she made was to squeeze his arm until they were flying down Roehampton Lane, and then, dreamily:
“There is something Infinite in friendship like ours, Man. It is all too wonderful....”
Diana was reading a magazine in The Study when Gordon came in. She threw down the magazine and jumped up from the chair (she sat at his desk when she read, with the exasperating result that the writing surface, which he left neat and ordered on his going out, was generally in a state of chaos on his coming in).
“Dinner,” she said tersely. “You’re late, Gord, devilishly late.”