They were detached for a time in crossing Bond Street, and the pavement was too crowded and Piccadilly was too congested for them to talk again until they went in St. James’ Street.
“Daddy,” said Christina Alberta, “seems ten thousand miles away. But when I’m over the amazement of this I expect I’ll get back to him all right. But just for a time—he must wait.”
“You’ll come in for a bit?” said Lambone at the corner of Half Moon Street. “I could give you some dinner.”
“No, thanks. I’ll walk all the way to Chelsea,” said Christina Alberta. “I want to think this out by myself. I want to get alone with this spinning head of mine and try to slow it down. My life’s gone topsy-turvy. Or it’s been topsy-turvy and it’s suddenly come right side up. I don’t know which. Oh!—I don’t know anything. I’ve got to begin all over again.”
She shook hands and paused. Lambone waited, for manifestly she had something to say. She got it out at last.
“Do you think—he liked me?”
“He liked you all right, Christina Alberta. Don’t you worry about that.”
§ 8
It was a little more than two days before Christina Alberta, to use her own expression, “got back” to her lost Daddy.
Those two days were full of an immense excitement. Devizes was the most wonderful fact in the world. She exploded into love for him. She had the most vivid impression of him, dark and tall, rather grave, watchful and amazingly understandable. Yet vivid as her impression was she doubted every detail of it, and wanted to go back to him and verify it all over again. It was their quality of mutual understanding that was at once the most delightful and the most incredible aspect of the whole affair. Their brains no doubt were unlike, as every two individual brains must be, yet their unlikeness was not a mere accumulation of accidental difference, but the unlikeness of two variations of one theme. She could feel his intentions beneath his words. Her mind had jumped with his realizations and there must be kinks and turns in her brain, kinks and turns that just made her difficult and queer for most people, which would find the completest parallels in his. She didn’t believe there was a thing in her thoughts and acts that she would be surprised at his knowing and comprehending.