“Not so many years.” I answered.
For a moment she brooded.
Then she glanced at me with a smile, half-sweet, half-wistful, that has stuck in my memory for ever.
“I like you!” she said. “I shall like to be engaged to you.”
And, faint on the threshold of hearing, I caught her ventured “dear!” It’s odd that in writing this down my memory passed over all that intervened and I feel it all again, and once again I’m Marion’s boyish lover taking great joy in such rare and little things.
VI
At last I went to the address my uncle had given me in Gower Street, and found my aunt Susan waiting tea for him.
Directly I came into the room I appreciated the change in outlook that the achievement of Tono-Bungay had made almost as vividly as when I saw my uncle’s new hat. The furniture of the room struck upon my eye as almost stately. The chairs and sofa were covered with chintz which gave it a dim, remote flavour of Bladesover; the mantel, the cornice, the gas pendant were larger and finer than the sort of thing I had grown accustomed to in London. And I was shown in by a real housemaid with real tails to her cap, and great quantities of reddish hair. There was my aunt too looking bright and pretty, in a blue-patterned tea-wrap with bows that seemed to me the quintessence of fashion. She was sitting in a chair by the open window with quite a pile of yellow-labelled books on the occasional table beside her. Before the large, paper-decorated fireplace stood a three-tiered cake-stand displaying assorted cakes, and a tray with all the tea equipage except the teapot, was on the large centre-table. The carpet was thick, and a spice of adventure was given it by a number of dyed sheep-skin mats.
“Hel-lo!” said my aunt as I appeared. “It’s George!”
“Shall I serve the tea now, Mem?” said the real housemaid, surveying our greeting coldly.