And battles long ago."
After all, self-preservation was the first law, and one could not accept a real responsibility for anything that was as inevitable as this. He was quite cheerful when I met him for dinner at the À-peu-près, and even pleasantly ironic at the expense of a white shirt-front and black tie which I was weak enough to think an evening call upon a lady in Portland Place demanded.
Althea received us in her own sanctum upon the second floor: a long, beautiful Adams room with creamy white walls hung sparsely with Carpacciesque Italian drawings in red chalk, a few water-colors of the old English school, and one great painting of the mad Venetian master, all splash and impasto, which, seen close at hand, was like a lichen stain on an old red wall, but, at a little distance, teemed with form and color. A bookcase of dark carved wood ran breast-high round the walls. Along its deep shelf were ranged bronzes, old Nankin jars, fragmental majolica figures—with an occasional faded embroidery or red morocco missal clasped with hammered silver. The carpet was of thick, dead-leaf-colored pile, and a brass railed fender with a wide leather seat ran across the low marble mantelpiece. Althea's room always struck me, personally, as the last word in that austere taste which roams the world, seeking and rejecting, in its quest of the beautiful.
She rose to meet us, and Paul had the impression of a woman, still young, in a loose pale satin gown, rather clumsy of figure but graceful of movement, with chestnut hair dressed low on her forehead, gray eyes under thick dark brows, a heavy jaw and just a hint of sensuality in the mouth. Her arms and hands were white and perfectly shaped; her ears finely modelled, and set as close to the head as though they had been carved from it in low relief.
As long as I was there we only talked commonplace, and I left them early, pleading the editorial discipline. I thought I had done my part in bringing them together, and walked back to Pimlico "on eggshells." But no sooner was I gone, (so I have heard since,) than she recrossed the room and, seating herself upon the fender, gazed at Ingram in silence for a long while. Try to imagine what balm to the misunderstood, thwarted spirit that level, frankly admiring regard must have been.
"Tell me all about it!" she said at last, abruptly and impulsively.
Paul smiled back into the intense gray eyes.
"All about what?"
"How you ever came to write such a story."