The sight of the real thing had, however, altered the whole position. Romance had suddenly touched Victor Jones; the gorgeous but sordid veils through which he had been pushing had split to some mystic wand, and had become the foliage of fairy land.
“I want to tell you—you are an old ass.”
Those words were surely enough to shatter any dream, to turn to pathos any situation. In Jones’ case they had acted as a most potent spell. He could still hear the voice, wrathful, but with a tinge of mirth in it, golden, individual, entrancing.
“How are you to help it?” said Spence. “Why, go and make up with her again, kick old Nichévo. Women like chaps that kick other chaps; they pretend they don’t, but they do. Either do that or take a gun and shoot her, she’d be better shot than with that fellow.”
He lit a cigarette and they passed into the card room, where Spence, looking at his watch, declared that he must be off to keep an appointment. They said good-bye in the street, and Jones returned to Carlton House Terrace.
He had plenty to think about.
The pile of letters waiting to be answered on the table in the smoking room reminded him that he had forgotten a most pressing necessity—a typist. He could sign letters all right, with a very good imitation of Rochester’s signature, but a holograph letter in the same hand was beyond him. Then a bright idea came to him, why not answer these letters with sixpenny telegrams, which he could hand in himself?
He found a sheaf of telegraph forms in the bureau, and sat down before the letters, dealing with them one by one, and as relevantly as he could. It was a rather interesting and amusing game, and when he had finished he felt fairly satisfied. “Awfully sorry can’t come,” was the reply to the dinner invitations. The letter signed “Childersley” worried him, till he looked up the name in “Who’s Who” and found a Lord answering to it at the same address as that on the note paper.
He had struck by accident on one of the alleviations of a major misery of civilized life, replying to Letters, and he felt like patenting it.
He left the house with the sheaf of telegrams, found the nearest post office—which is situated directly opposite to Charing Cross Station—and returned. Then lighting a cigar, he took the friendly and indefatigable “Who’s Who” upon his knee, and began to turn the pages indolently. It is a most interesting volume for an idle moment, full of scattered romance, tales of struggle and adventure, compressed into a few lines, peeps of history, and the epitaphs of still living men.