Enter Major Armstrong. At the sight of David he flushes and looks fierce.
Honoria: "So glad you've come, dear Major. I hear mother has had a good nap. I must go to her presently. You know David Vavasour Williams?—Davy! You really must leave out your second name! It gets so fatiguing having to say it every time I introduce you."
Armstrong bows stiffly and David, standing with one well-shaped foot in a neat boot on the curb of the fireplace, looks up and returns the bow.
Honoria: "This won't do. You are two of my dearest friends, and yet you hardly greet one another. I always determined from the age of fifteen onwards I would never pass my life as men and women in a novel do—letting misunderstandings creep on and on where fifty words might settle them. Army! You've often asked me to marry you—or at least so I've understood your broken sentences. I never refused you in so many words. Now I say distinctly 'Yes'—if you'll have me. Only, you know quite well I can't actually marry you whilst mother lies so ill..."
Major Armstrong, very red in the face, in a mixture of exultation, sympathy and annoyance that the affairs of his heart are being discussed before a whipper-snapper stranger—says: "Honoria! Do you mean it? Oh..."
Honoria: "Of course I mean it! And if I drew back you could now have a breach-of-promise-of-marriage action, with David as an important witness. D.V.W.—who by the bye is a cousin of my greatest friend—my friend for life, whether you like her—as you ought to do—or not—Vivie Warren.... David is reading for the Bar; and besides being your witness to what I have just said, might—if you deferred your action long enough—be your Counsel.... Now look here," (with a catch in the voice) "you two dear things. My nerves are all to bits.... I haven't slept properly for nights and nights. David, dear, if you must talk any more business before you go down to Wales, you must come and see me to-morrow.... Darling mother! I can't bear the thought you may not live to see my happiness." (David discreetly withdraws without a formal good-bye, and as he goes out and the firelight flickers up, sees Armstrong take Honoria in his arms.)
CHAPTER VIII
THE BRITISH CHURCH
David had read hard all through Hilary term with Mr. Stansfield of the Inner Temple; he had passed examinations brilliantly; he had solved knotty problems in the legal line for Fraser and Warren, and as already related he had begun to go out into Society. Indeed, starting from the Rossiters' Thursdays and Praed's studio suppers, he was being taken up by persons of influence who were pleased to find him witty, possessed of a charming voice, of quiet but unassailable manners. Opinions differed as to his good looks. Some women proclaimed him as adorable, rather Sphynx-like, you know, but quite fascinating with his well-marked eye-brows, his dark and curly lashes, the rich warm tints of his complexion, the unfathomable grey eyes and short upper lip with the down of adolescence upon it. Other women without assigning any reason admitted he did not produce any effect on their sensibility—they disliked law students, they said, even if they were of a literary turn; they also disliked curates and shopwalkers and sidesmen ... and Sunday-school teachers. Give them manly men; avowed soldiers and sailors, riders to hounds, sportsmen, big game hunters, game-keepers, chauffeurs—the chauffeur was becoming a new factor in Society, Bernard Shaw's "superman"—prize-fighters, meat-salesmen—then you knew where you were.