‘Where do you want me to drop you?’ she asked.
‘We’ve passed it,’ he said. ‘At least, he hasn’t gone anywhere near it. I live in Wyndham Place. I’ll see you safely home and then take him on.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but you’ll have to let me pay my share.’
‘And I say,’ he went on quickly, waving whatever she was doing with her purse impatiently aside, for by now they were careering across Berkeley Square and he knew the time was short, ‘you haven’t said if I may come and see you. I would like so frightfully to come and see you. There are such a lot of things I want to say—I mean, hear you say. And we do nothing but talk about that infernal Immortal Hour.’
‘What? Why, I thought you loved it.’
‘Of course I love it, but it isn’t everything. And we’ve given it a fairly good innings, haven’t we. Do let me come and see you. I shall’—he was going to say ‘die if you don’t,’ but he was afraid that might put her off, though he’d be hanged, he said to himself, if it wasn’t very likely perfectly true, so he quickly substituted ‘I shall be in London all next Sunday.’
They were at the bottom of Hertford Street. They were rushing along it. Even while he was speaking they were there at 90A. With a grinding of the brakes the taxi pulled up,—a violent taxi, the most violent he had ever met; and he might just as easily have had the luck to get one of those slow, cautious ancient ones, driven by bearded patriarchs who always came to his call when he had to catch a train or was late for a dinner, and always at every cross street drew back with an old-world courtesy and encouraged even horse-traffic to pass along first.
‘May I come next Sunday?’ he asked, obliged to lean across her and open the door, because she was preparing, as he didn’t move and merely sat there, to open it herself. ‘No—don’t get out,’ he said quickly, as she showed signs of going to. ‘It’s no use standing in the wet. Wait here while I go and ring——’
‘But look—I have a latchkey,’ she said. ‘Besides, the night porter is there.’
The night porter was; and hearing a taxi stop he opened the door at that moment.