That Gita loved him, however collaterally, he had never had the happiness to suspect; although he had known that night as they sat opposite in the dim drawing-room, disguised as their more picturesque ancestors, he would have attempted to win her if she had been free—yes, won, in the end, for he had felt that curious vibration between them. And even after that amazing assertion of hers at the Pleydens’ he refused to believe that Polly’s regard for him was anything but bright friendship spiced with coquetry. He had immense confidence in himself as a surgeon, but had given too little time or thought to women for the fostering of conceit. He was quite unlike the vapid men of her circle—he had heard or read somewhere that all society men were vapid—and he amused this brilliant rather metallic little butterfly for the moment.
She certainly amused him, let him down, sent him back to his work refreshed; and during this last week she had been as spring-water in a thirsty desert. That Polly was too proud to reveal a glimpse of her deeper feelings, or even to betray sentiment until he gave her her cue, was the last thing that would have occurred to him. Love alone would have shattered his obtuseness and his love-stream was flowing turbulently in another direction.
After that first meeting in his mother’s house he had found himself thinking of Gita at the most unexpected and inopportune moments. She projected herself abruptly upon his mental retina when he was sterilizing his instruments preparatory to an operation, discussing a case gravely with his chief, taking his brisk morning walk, relaxing his mind at the play, trying to fall asleep. He had been profoundly annoyed, but attributed the phenomenon to her unusual appearance. Those fierce black eyes and extraordinary eyelashes, that spirited head that looked as if it were about to lift her shoulders and fly upward, would probably haunt any man. No doubt she had a personality as remarkable, although she had said nothing he could remember, merely asked a good many questions. But what it might be did not interest him in the least. He would not care if he never met her again. His mind that night had been like an inadvertently exposed plate and the impression it had received would fade in due course.
When her unexpected invitation to the Christmas party arrived he had accepted it in the hope that a second meeting would lay the ghost. But when he had entered that great hall lit with pine torches, flaring down on men and women in white wigs and bygone costumes, as gorgeous a scene as even that old manor house, famed for its hospitality in the days of Colonial governors, had ever witnessed, two centuries seemed to drop out of life; and as he stood in the shadow, watching the mock-stately evolutions of the minuet, a fine haze like a golden cobweb stole over his brain, and he had a quiet conviction he had been there before and was here again for some more definite purpose. Earlier, he had half laughed, half frowned at his reflection in the mirror; but even then it had seemed to him his transformation was so complete as to create a doubt if he would be able to shake off this new personality on the morrow. He certainly would never cease to wonder that for one night in his life he had been handsome.
The romp that finished the minuet had brought him out of his hallucination and he had moved forward merely to find his hostess and do his first duty as a guest. After that he would look on for a while, enjoying the beauty of the pageant, and then slip out. There was no place in such a scene for him.
When he had stood staring for a moment at Gita, hardly knowing what banalities he might be uttering, again with that iridescent cobweb flung over his brain and that curious beating of old memories beneath, his impulse was to flee incontinently. But after a dance with Miss Pleyden, during which he believed that ridiculous illusions had fled forever, he had deliberately sought Gita in the drawing-room, determined to have done with nonsense forthwith.
He was a practical man in a practical age, a surgeon with a brilliant future, a man who wanted no woman in his life to distract him, certainly not the wife of Eustace Bylant. A surgeon, of all men, should find nothing romantic in the most resplendent of women. He had cut too many of them up. They were all made precisely alike inside and if they varied in texture of skin and in feature, inches and symmetry, the best of them could be classified into types and their original purpose hadn’t deviated by a hair’s breadth. To idealize them was as nonsensical as to idealize passion and call it spiritual love. Even what personality they might possess was due to the balance of hormones in their ductless glands. Anything further was the result of imitation and artifice. Women somewhere in the dawn of time had concocted a set of tricks and some were more skillful in the use of them than others, some had a more arresting beauty, some a more powerful magnetism (super-active generative hormones), but not one of them, unless possessed of interesting abnormalities, would cut up differently from the other. They were the vehicles of the race, nothing more. Cut out the sexual organs of the most beautiful woman in the world and she would wither like a rose broken on its stem. Take them out in childhood and she would be a neuter and semi-imbecile or worse. There would be no more “soul” in her, no more ego, nor personality, than in a cadaver on the operating-table. Sterilize the Graafian follicles with the X-ray, coincidentally stimulating and proliferating the interstitial cells, and a faded woman’s beauty would not only be restored but more likely than not she would possess a magnetism lacking when the function was divided. Perhaps develop a higher “spirituality,” soaring mute aspirations: sublimation of the sex-urge.
His scientific mind restored to its balance, he walked into the drawing-room where Gita sat with the candle-light playing on her white wig and golden gown, flickering in the depths of her black eyes, and, without more ado, fell incurably and uncompromisingly in love.
Afterward he wondered how he had managed to confine himself to an oblique declaration, refrained from pouring his passion over her in a flood. But he had clung tenaciously to the thought of Eustace Bylant, even when she casually announced that she was entering upon a travesty of marriage. That had filled him with exultation but left him as little at liberty to speak.
At the altar he renounced her, although he felt as if the world were sinking under him and left him forever suspended in space. But he looked forward to the sanity of the morrow, to daylight, to the unpicturesque garb of his matter-of-fact era. Thankfully he remembered he was to operate on a woman for cancer at ten o’clock.