Tony came in.
"Do you remember," she said—and then, suddenly, with a wave of misery, she realised it. The phrase did not belong to her.
V
THE MARTYR
[To H.G. Wells]
I, myself, have always liked Delancey Woburn. To begin with, there is something so endearing about the way he displays his defects, never hiding them or tidying them away or covering them up. There they are for all the world to see, a reassuring shop window full of frank shortcomings. Besides, I never can resist triumphant vitality. Delancey is overflowing with joie de vivre, with curiosity, with a certainty of imminent adventure. If you say to him, "I saw a policeman," his face lights up and so it would if you said "I saw a dog," or a cat, or a donkey-cart. To him policemen and dogs and cats and donkey-carts are always just about to do something dramatic or absurd or unexpected. Nor is he discouraged by unfailing regularity in their behaviour. Faith is "the evidence of things not seen."
And then, too, he is so very welcoming. Not, of course, that he makes you feel you are the only person in the world because a world with only one other person in it would be inconceivably horrible to him, but he does make you quite sure that he is most frightfully glad to see you—all the gladder because it is such a surprise. Delancey always makes a point of being surprised. Also, though he is invariably in a hurry—being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life—he as invariably turns round and walks with you, in your direction, to convince himself that having met you in Jermyn Street is an altogether unexpected and delightful adventure. And he never feels, as I always do, that a five minutes' conversation is a stupid, embarrassing thing, too long for mere civility and too short for anything else. The five minutes are filled to the brim and off he rushes again, leaving me just a little more tired and leisurely from the contact. Delancey is the life and soul of a party—or perhaps I should say the life and body. He likes eating and drinking and talking to women and talking to men and smoking and telling a story. And if he does address his neighbour a little as if she were a meeting at a bye-election, open air, he at any rate never addresses her as if she were a duty and no one had ever wanted to kiss her.
To Delancey all women have had lovers and husbands and children and religious conversions and railway accidents. Old maids and clergymen's wives adore him.