When Monty had moved forward to great old Dalrymple, who was some sort of artist, Harry had felt his usual dislike of the man, based upon the feeling that Dalrymple carried with him an air of stale drink and unsuccess. But he had looked past the old man to the unknown girl who seemed to be his companion; and instantly there shot through him that strong sexual interest which Harry was in the habit of calling "love." He was a strong young man, very sufficiently sensual, and his notions of love were made accordingly. It was a quick impulse, and his first thought after receiving it and deciding that he must know the stranger was the realisation that what he had desired Monty also would desire. And then, ignoring all the others present, he had sharply sensed danger. The glance at Edgar had been quite three-quarters of a challenge. The flashing teeth had been bared, and the blue eyes had been hard. But there was something about Edgar which disarmed him. Hence the smile.
This was not the first time Harry had been in love. He was attractive, and he was quickly attracted. He had self-assurance, and he knew how to give pleasure. To Rhoda Flower he was certainly the most attractive person in the world. It was to her that he continued quietly to talk while the stranger was being brought forward to the group round the fireplace. He was teasing Rhoda, and gave no further sign of interest in the other girl; but he knew when she was near. He turned his head and looked at her. He looked from near at hand at the soft, beautifully moulded cheeks and the impetuous mouth and the clear blue eyes; and a very faint additional colour came into his face. Not knowing that Edgar was watching him, he was perfectly aware of the girl's grace and beauty. The curve of her neck and breast and shoulder seemed always to have been known and entrancing to him. With Harry it was love at first sight.
"... Greenlees—Miss Quin," said Monty, leading the stranger from one to the other of his older friends, and making her acquainted with them all.
The smoke-filled atmosphere seemed to come down like a cloud against which she stood fresh and lovely. All the vehemences of colour about him were softened. For that instant Harry saw nothing but the stranger, felt nothing but her hand. He found Miss Quin adorable. She was a reality, a sweet and wayward reality, like a flash of scarlet; and his one desire was to feel her soft hair against his cheek, her cool shoulder, her surrendered lips. The imagination of these contacts was intense. Into Harry's expression of light spirits crept something ever so slightly heavier. He was serious. To him the senses were a cause of seriousness, a cause of the complete oblivion of all that was comic or whimsical.
From behind him came the voice of the young artist, Amy Roberts.
"Hullo, Patricia," she said in greeting.
Patricia! Patricia Quin. So that was the stranger's name. Harry's faint flush subsided. He cooled. The vision had passed. The quick physical imagining was for the present gone, no longer an eager craving. He must talk to her, see her, be with her; but in a few minutes, quite easily and simply. What lay in the future was something which stretched much farther than his immediate vision. To Harry it beckoned as irresistible adventure.
ii
The party swayed and engulfed Patricia. She was among all the others, and talking or listening, extraordinarily delighted with all this sound and colour. To her, whose first party of the kind it was, such a brimming claim to the senses had no shortcomings. It was all new and glorious and intoxicating. She felt herself a queen. Wherever she looked she found the strong colour and sensation for which she had pined. It was the first party, and a landmark. Compared with her days and the unattractive dinginess of her own rooms, Monty's home was all that was rich and desirable. At two-and-twenty, when one is starving for colour, a glut of it is like a feast. She was so happy, like a child at its first theatre, that she sat there spell-bound. It could not have occurred to her to think these people sophisticated; they were all so kind, she thought to herself, so kind and generous and interesting. Her heart went out to them all. It was as though she cast her own warm affectionateness upon the party. Her radiance increased with each instant. The corners of her mouth went up; her sweet, child-like laugh melted into the general laughter. All this light and colour and sound was superb. It was vivacity and richness, music and poetry, an unequalled stimulant to gaiety and the senses. It was life as she had dreamt of it. There was a spice of daring in such contact with the unknown and the exciting, and daring was her ideal. It was lovely.... She was in a beautiful dream of delight.
Even Patricia at last began to look, beaming in her happiness, from one face to the other. They were all faces that interested her. They all had a cast—not of dignity or wisdom, but of something which she thought of as enlightenment. There was a quality about them to which she was unaccustomed, and she exalted it. She was prepared to find all knowledge and emotion in the faces, and she found it. The tones of the voices charmed her; the little jokes which she did not understand, and the fragments of criticism which belonged to another world of interests and consciousness, were all a part of the magic and delight of the evening. She set herself to look round the studio, sitting close to Amy Roberts, as a child might have done, while Amy, to whom all this sort of thing was becoming almost as commonplace as she pretended to Patricia that it already was, preserved an air of most distinguished semi-boredom. Amy, herself an artist, told her the names of those present, and sometimes, if she knew it, something about the people. Patricia from time to time glanced aside at Amy's fair bobbed hair and her white face and light lashes and eyebrows and dissatisfied mouth; and thought how nice Amy was, and how clever, and how she wished Amy had a sense of humour of the same kind as her own.