“They are usually pretty good,” he said lamely. “I think we’d better go by bus.”
They mounted a bus and sat silently side by side.
When they stopped by the Cobden statue he said:—
“A friend of mine has just taken a studio in Camden Town. His name is Logan.”
“Was he at the Detmold?”
“No.”
That settled Logan for her. She began to feel anxious. Was the afternoon going to be a failure? Why could she never, never get the better of her shyness? She wanted to make him happy because, on the whole, people had been beastly to him and said such horrid things about him. She wanted him to feel for himself, and not only through her, that the world was a very wonderful place, a place in which to be happy. He was so stiff and different, so taut and tightly strung up, that lounging, loose-limbed Mitchell seemed graceful compared with him. Yet there was something unforgettable about him, and he had always had for her the vivid romantic reality of the beautiful young men on the stage, who were creatures of a delicious, absurd world which she would never enter and never wished to enter: a world where young men opened their arms and young women sank into them and were provided with happiness for ever and ever. Her vigour rejected this world, for she knew and lived in a better, but all the same it had its charm and its curious reality. . . .
She was not shy because she had kissed him. That had passed with the shifting light through the trees and the clouds in the sky. It had been vivid and true for that moment, but it had perished and fallen away like a drop of water, like a rainbow.
He remembered it. As he sat by her side and could feel the warm life in her, it became terribly actual to him, the cool contact of her lips, and he was glad when the bus reached the yard with the painted swing-boats and he need no longer sit by her side. He had begun to feel subservient to her, and he would not have that. What Rosa was to Issy, what Golda was to his father, that should a woman be to him, for it was good and decent so. . . . He was almost sorry he had come. He was painfully shy, and knew that she was suffering under it.
He walked so fast that she was hard put to keep up with him, but she swung out and would not be beaten, and managed his pace without losing her breath. Over to the wooded side of the Heath he took her, and stopped under a chestnut-tree.