“She’ll be along presently. She’s upstairs changing.”
“Who?”
“Iris Mortimer ... didn’t I tell you? It’s the whole reason.”
Clarissa nodded slyly from the chair opposite me. A warm wind crossed the room and the white curtains billowed like spinnakers in a regatta. I breathed the warm odor of flowers, of burned ash remnants from the fireplace: the room shone with silver and porcelain. Clarissa was rich despite the wars and crises that had marked our days, leaving the usual scars upon us, like trees whose cross-sections bear a familial resemblance of concentric rings, recalling in detail the weather of past years ... at least those few rings we shared in common, or Clarissa, by her own admission, was twenty-two hundred years old with an uncommonly good memory. None of us had ever questioned her too closely about her past. There is no reason to suspect, however, that she was insincere. Since she felt she had lived that great length of time and since her recollections were remarkably interesting and plausible she was much in demand as a conversationalist and adviser, especially useful in those plots which require great shrewdness and daring. It was perfectly apparent that she was involved in some such plot at the moment.
I looked at her thoughtfully before I casually rose to take the bait of mystery she had trailed so perfunctorily before me. She knew her man. She knew I would not be difficult in the early stages of any adventure.
“Whole reason?” I repeated.
“I can say no more!” said Clarissa with a melodramatic emphasis which my deliberately casual tone did not entirely justify. “You’ll love Iris, though.”
I wondered whether loving Iris, or pretending to love Iris, was to be the summer’s game. But before I could inquire further, Clarissa, secure in her mystery, asked me idly about my work and, as idly, I answered her, the exchange perfunctory yet easy, for we were used to one another.
“I am tracking him down,” I said. “There is so little to go on, but what there is is quite fascinating, especially Ammianus.”
“Fairly reliable, as military men go,” said Clarissa, suddenly emerging from her polite indifference: any reference to the past she had known always interested her, only the present seemed to bore her, at least that ordinary unusable present which did not contain promising material for one of her elaborate human games.