“No, because you wouldn’t look at me—you were too much engaged. Do you like this step?”
“I like them all.”
“Do you always dance like this? Do you always make your partner feel as if he had danced with you all his life?”
“It is—because we played together in the garden,” said Robin and then was quite terrified at herself. Because after all—after all they were only two conventional young people meeting for the first time at a dance, not knowing each other in the least. It was really the first time. The meeting of two children could not count. But the beating and strange elated inward tremor would not stop.
As for him he felt abnormal also and he was usually a very normal creature. It was abnormal to be so excited that he found himself, as it were, upon another plane, because he had recognized and was dancing with a girl he had not seen since she was five or six. It was not normal that he should be possessed by a desire to keep near to her, overwhelmed by an impelling wish to talk to her—to ask her questions. About what—about herself—themselves—the years between—about the garden.
“It began to come back bit by bit after I had two fair looks. You passed me several times though you didn’t know.” (Oh! had she not known!) “I had been promised some dances by other people. But I went to Lady Lothwell. She’s very kind.”
Back swept the years and it had all begun again, the wonderful happiness—just as the anguish had swept back on the night her mother had come to talk to her. As he had brought it into her dreary little world then, he brought it now. He had the power. She was so happy that she seemed to be only waiting to hear what he would say—as if that were enough. There are phases like this—rare ones—and it was her fate that through such a phase she was passing.
It was indeed true that much more water had passed under his bridge than under hers, but now—! Memory reproduced for him with an acuteness like actual pain, a childish torment he thought he had forgotten. And it was as if it had been endured only yesterday—and as if the urge to speak and explain was as intense as it had been on the first day.
“She’s very little and she won’t understand,” he had said to his mother. “She’s very little, really—perhaps she’ll cry.”
How monstrous it had seemed! Had she cried—poor little soul! He looked down at her eyelashes. Her cheek had been of the same colour and texture then. That came back to him too. The impulse to tighten his arms was infernally powerful—almost automatic.