The night he got this feeling he was surprised how much he disliked it. What was happening to him? Was he falling in love? And he didn’t even know her name. It was the night of her fourteenth visit and his forty-eighth—for since they had made friends he went oftener than ever in the hope of seeing her, and the very programme young women looked at him as though they had known him all their lives—that this cold feeling first filtered into his warm and comfortable heart, and nipped its comfort; and it wasn’t that he had seen a wedding ring, for she never took off her absurd, small gloves—it was something indescribably not a girl about her.
He tried to pin it down into words, but he couldn’t; it remained indescribable. And whether it had to do with the lines of her figure, which were rounder than most girls’ figures in these flat days, or with the things she said, for the life of him he couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was her composure, her air of settled safety, of being able to make friends with any number of strange young men, pick them up and leave them, exactly when and how she chose.
Still, it might not be true. She was always alone. Sooner or later, if there were husbands they appeared. No husband of a wife so sweet would let her come out at night like this by herself, he thought. Yes, he probably was mistaken. He didn’t know much about women. Up to this he had only had highly unsatisfactory, rough and tumble relations with them, and he couldn’t compare. And though he and she had now sat together several times, they had talked entirely about The Immortal Hour—they were both so very enthusiastic—and its music, and its singers, and Celtic legends generally, and at the end she always smiled the smile that enchanted him, and nodded and slipped away, so that they had never really got any further than the first night.
‘Look here,’ he said, or rather blurted, the next time he saw her there—he now went as a matter of course to sit next to her—‘you might tell me your name. Mine’s Monckton. Christopher Monckton.’
‘But of course,’ she said. ‘Mine is Cumfrit.’
Cumfrit? He thought it a funny little name; but somehow like her.
‘Just’—he held his breath—‘Cumfrit?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, there’s Catherine as well,’ she said.
‘I like that. It’s pretty. They’re sweet and pretty, said together. They’re—well, extraordinarily like you.’
She laughed again. ‘But they’re not both like me,’ she said. ‘I owe the Cumfrit part to George.’