She also had a little money of her own, but the striking out was a little difficult for her. Her father and mother, all the relations said, needed her, and it wanted all the year and a half to prove to the relations that this was not so. Her father scarcely saw her except at breakfast and, although he regarded her with a kindly patronage, he preferred greatly his books, his club, and his daily newspaper. Her mother did not need her at all, having been angered before the war at the action that Millie took in the great family quarrel of Katherine v. Mrs. Trenchard, and being now completely under the control of a hard and tyrannical woman, Nurse Bennett, whose word now was law in the house, whose slightest look was a command.
Millicent and Henry determined that when they escaped it should be together. Millicent had her own plans, and after some months of mysterious advertising in the newspaper, of interviews and secret correspondences, she secured the post of secretary companion to a certain Miss Victoria Platt who lived at 85 Cromwell Road, Kensington. At the very same time Philip found for Henry the secretaryship of which I have already spoken. They escaped then together—Millicent to rooms at the top of Baker Street that she shared with a girl friend, Mary Cass, and Henry to the hospitality of Mr. King. Their engagements also were to begin together, Millicent going to Miss Platt for the first time on the morning after the day of which I am writing, Henry to go to his Baronet on the day after that.
They were beginning the world together. There was surely a fine omen in that. Apart they would do great things—but, together, was there anything they could not do?
At 7.15 that evening, bathed in the blue dusk that filtered in through the little attic window Henry was sitting on his bed staring, wide-eyed, in front of him.
At 8.15 on that same evening, hidden now by the purple shades of night he was still sitting there, his mouth open, staring in front of him. It is desperately platitudinous—it is also desperately true, that there is no falling in love like the first falling in love. And Henry was fortunate in this—that he had fallen in love for the first time at a comparatively ripe age. To some it is the governess or the music-master, to some even the nurse or the gardener's boy. But Henry had in the absolute truth of the absolute word never been in love before to-night.
He had loved—yes. First his mother, then his sister Katherine, then his sister Millicent, then his friend Westcott. These affections had been loyal and true and profound but they had been of the heart and the brain, and for true love the lust of the flesh must be added to the lust of the mind and the heart.
He had tumbled in then, to-day, head foremost, right in, with all his hero-worship, his adoration, his ignorance, his purity, his trust and confidence, fresh, clean, unsullied to offer as acceptable gifts. He could not, sitting on his bed, think it out clearly at all. He could only see everything in a rosy mist and in the heart of the mist a flaming feather, and Piccadilly boiling and bubbling and Mrs. Tenssen with her bright green dress and the stable-yard and the teapot with the flowers and there—somewhere behind these things—that girl with her fair hair, her unhappy gaze beyond him, far far beyond him, into worlds that were not as yet his but that one day might be. And with all this his heart pounding in a strange suffocating manner, his eyes burning, his throat choking, his brain refusing to bring before him two connected thoughts.
At last, when St. James's Church struck half-past eight a thought did penetrate.
He had promised to go to the Hunters' evening party. Never less did he want to go to a party than to-night. He would wish to continue to sit on his bed and study the rosy mist. "I will sit here," he said, "and perhaps soon the face will come to me just as it was. I can't see it now, but if I wait. . . ." Then he had cramp in his leg and the sudden jerk shot him from the bed and forced him to stand in the middle of the floor in an extraordinary attitude with one leg stiff and the other bent as though he were Nijinsky practising for the "Spectre de la Rose."
The shock of his agony drove him to consider two very good reasons for going to the Hunters' party. One was material—namely, that he had had nothing to eat since Mrs. Tenssen's pink cake, that he was very hungry in spite of his love and that there would be free sandwiches at the Hunters. The other reason was a better one—namely, that it was possible that his friend Westcott would be there and to Westcott, above all human beings, save only Millicent, he wished to confide the history of his adventure.