Now, indeed, was Christopher perfectly happy, as he sat beside Catherine in the thrice-blessed theatre where they had first met and compared the past with the present. Only a week ago they were there,—together indeed, but met as usual without his being sure they were going to meet, and he hadn’t even known where she lived. They were strangers,—discussing, as strangers would on such an occasion, the Celtic legends; and George, and Stephen, and the Hertford Street drawing-room, and even Ned in his car and the fluttering Fanshawes, now such vivid permanences in his mind, were still sleeping, as far as he was concerned, in the womb of time. Only a week ago and he had never touched her, never shaken hands, never said anything at all to her that could be considered—well, personal. Now he had said many such things; and although she had been restive over some of them, and although he knew he must proceed with such prudence as he could manage, yet please God, he told himself, he’d say many more of them before another week had passed.
There they sat together, after dining together, and there before her eyes on the stage was a lesson going on in how most beautifully to make love. He knew she always thrilled to that scene. Did she, he wondered, even vaguely take the lesson to heart? Did she at all, even dimly, think, ‘How marvellous to do that too’? Well, he would bring her steadily to this place, not leave it to chance any more, but go and fetch her and bring her to seats taken beforehand, bring her till it did get through to her consciousness that here was not only an exquisite thing to watch other people doing, but to go home and do oneself. How long would it take to get her to that stage? He felt so flaming with will, so irresistible in his determination, that he never doubted she would get there; but it might take rather a long time, he thought, glancing sideways at the little untouchable, ungetatable thing, sitting so close to him and yet so completely removed. If once she loved him, if once he could make her begin to love him, then he felt certain she would love him wonderfully, with a divine extravagance.... He would make her. He could make her. She wouldn’t be able to resist such a great flame of love as his.
When it was over she said she wanted to walk home.
‘You can’t walk, it’s too far,’ he said; and signalled to a taxi.
She took no notice of the taxi, and said they would walk part of the way, and then pick up an omnibus.
‘But you’re tired, you’re tired—you can’t,’ he implored; for what a finish to his evening, to trudge through slums and then be jolted in a public conveyance. If only it were raining, if only it weren’t such an odiously dry fine night!
‘I’m not tired,’ she said, while the merciless lights outside the theatre made her look tired to ghastliness, ‘and I want to walk through the old Bloomsbury squares. Then we can get an omnibus in Tottenham Court Road. See,’ she finished, smiling up at him, ‘how well I know the ropes of the poor.’
‘What I see is how badly you need some one to take care of you,’ he said, obliged to do what she wanted, and slouching off beside her, while she seemed to be walking very fast because she took two steps to his one.
‘Mrs. Mitcham takes the most careful care of me.’
‘Oh—Mrs. Mitcham. I mean some one with authority. The authority of love.’