“I’m going to win.”
“That’s right. Never say die. I expect you’ve taken her rather too much by surprise. I’m quite sure when I last saw Paddy, it had never entered her head for a moment that you cared a fig about her except to tease. Give her time to come round a bit. It sounds like playing a salmon, doesn’t it? I’m sure it will be heaps more interesting than if she’d said ‘yes’ right away, and you’ll both care more in the end. That’s what I tell Bob sometimes. I was much too easily won, and I want to go back and begin again, I just dropped right off the tree into his hands like an over-ripe cherry. Disgusting to think of—isn’t it? I ought to have let him mope and pine a bit, and pretended I didn’t care. Only I’d have been so horribly afraid he thought I meant it, and gone off, or something. I guess that sort of thing is all very fine to talk about and in story books, but when it comes to pretending you don’t like a man, when you’re just dying to have him all for your own—why it isn’t human nature. Them’s my sentiments!”
Lawrence could not help smiling, but it was poor enough comfort for him, though before they separated Gwen did really cheer him a little by her determined hopefulness and sanguinity.
With Paddy, however, she did not get on in the matter quite so well as she had expected. At the very first allusion Paddy simply drew back into herself, and refused to be coaxed or cajoled into uttering a single word. Gwen tried several times and then had to give in.
“Oh, well, if you won’t, you won’t,” she said. “I always thought I took the biscuit for pure, downright obstinacy, but I hand it on to you now.”
Lawrence himself did not come to London until the end of October, having decided it was best not to be in too great a hurry, and he had better have a turn at the pheasants first. When he came he stayed with the Grant-Carews, and it was here he met Paddy through a little subterfuge of Gwen’s.
“My poppa and momma,” she wrote to Paddy, “are going to a terrible, overpowering, grand-turk, political luncheon party, to which flighty young persons like myself are not admitted, but have to remain at home alone and bear the weight of the distinction of belonging to some one who has been admitted. Do be a dear girl and come and bear the weight with me. With your company and a liberal supply of De Brei’s chocolates I anticipate getting through the afternoon all right. In case of accidents, however, I may just mention the fact of our loneliness to one of His Majesty’s Horse Guards, but you will have no occasion to be uneasy anyway—Comprenez?”
Paddy accepted the invitation, but as Gwen fluttered across the drawing-room to receive her, her quick eyes instantly descried in the far window the back of a well-cut masculine coat, that was somehow familiar.
“Who is here?” she asked at once.
“Only Lawrence,” said Gwen, in the most casual fashion. “He is staying with us. Didn’t I tell you?”