Mrs. Tenssen, whose orange garments shone with ill-temper, shook hands with Henry as though she expected him instantly to say: "Well, I must be going now," but he found himself with an admirable pugnacity and defiant resolve.
"I called as I said I would," he observed pleasantly. "And I came in by the door and not by the window," he added, laughing.
She murmured something, but did not attempt to introduce him to her companion.
He meanwhile had advanced with rather mincing steps to the girl, was bowing over her hand and then to Henry's infinite disgust was kissing it. Then Henry forgot all else in his adoration of the girl. He will never forget, to the end of whatever life that may be granted him, the picture that she made at that moment, standing in the garish, overlighted room, like a queen in her aloofness from them all, from everything that life could offer if that room, that old man, that woman were truly typical of its gifts. "It wasn't only," Henry said afterwards to Peter, "that she was beautiful. Millie's beautiful—more beautiful I suppose than Christina. But Millie is flesh and blood. You can believe that she has toothache. But it was like a spell, a witchery. The beastly old man himself felt it. As though he had tried to step on to sacred ground and was thrown back on to common earth again. By gad, Peter, you don't know how stupid he suddenly looked—and how beastly! She's remote, a vision—not perhaps for any one to touch—ever . . .!"
"That," said Peter, "is because you're in love with her—and Millie's your sister."
"No, there's more than that. It may be partly because she's a foreigner—but you'd feel the same if you saw her. Her remoteness, as though the farther towards her you moved the farther away she'd be. Always in the distance and knowing that you can come no nearer. And yet if she knew that really she wouldn't be so frightened as she is. . . ."
"It's all because you're so young, Henry," Peter ended up.
But young or no Henry just then wasn't very happy. The old man with his shrill voice and his ironic, almost cynical determination to be pleased with everything that any one did or said (it came, maybe, from a colossal and patronizing arrogance)—reminded Henry of the old "nicky-nacky" Senator in Otway's Venice Preserved which he had once seen performed by some amateur society. He remained entirely unclouded by Mrs. Tenssen's obvious boredom and ill-temper, moods so blatantly displayed that Henry in spite of himself was crushed.
The girl showed no signs of any further interest in the company.
Mrs. Tenssen sat at the table, picking her teeth with a toothpick and saying, "Indeed!" or "Well I never!" in an abstracted fashion when the old man's pauses seemed to demand something. Her bold eyes moved restlessly round the room, pausing upon things as though she hated them and sometimes upon Henry who was standing, indeterminately, first on one foot and then on another. Something the old man said seemed suddenly to rouse her: