“Varied by ducking for bullets every moment,” remarked Miss Regan. “He oughtn’t to know so many people. Not that I admire the military bearing. It’s so unnatural and stiff. One sees the drill behind. Even those little wooden soldiers I never liked. Good-bye, Mr. Strang.”
“Au revoir, I hope,” he said. Her, at least, he could answer.
He went to the “Sunday afternoon” at five o’clock, the earliest hour one could decently go to a reception commencing at four. In the meantime he had reread a great deal of Shelley, who seemed to have written a great deal about Eleanor, as she became to her lover’s secret thought, though her full name he learned was the Honorable Mrs. Wyndwood, and she was the daughter-in-law of a Viscount, and connected by blood or marriage with several pages of Debrett. In the hopelessness of his love these ties were no separation; he did not think of anything but the blissful pain of seeing her again. He had ridden every morning in the Row, but neither of the friends had shown herself.
The reception was held in a flat half way up a bleak stone staircase in the West Central district. He was so agitated that he forgot to note the hat-rack, and his first glance at the company appalled him with the sense of a cosmopolitan chaos, without form and void, over which no light of Mrs. Wyndwood brooded. There were mystic oil-paintings on the walls of the narrow room, and on the gray marble mantel-piece stood a glass of water, in which floated vaguely the white of an egg.
The host introduced him to his wife—a tall, haggard, giraffe-necked woman—who gave him a cup of tea, and passed him on to a nervously peering Herr Grundau, who spoke to him of the revival of religion among the University Burschen, and passed him on to Mademoiselle Brinskaïa, a little yellow Polishwoman, with eyes like live coals, who had been speaking every European language in turn with equal fluency, as she knitted colored wools into some occult pattern.
“I have heard your name,” she told him in English that sounded almost native, as he seated himself next to her in the cushioned window-seat.
“It is so good of you to say so,” he murmured, automatically, not without the astonishment which from the first had pervaded him when strangers professed knowledge of him, and which had never quite worn off. He thought his peculiar name accounted for his notoriety.
“You’re not a spiritual artist,” she said, half interrogatively.
“An artist can only be artistic,” he replied, in vague self-defence.
“That’s all my eye and Betty Martin,” said Mademoiselle, knitting indefatigably. Then she smiled. “You see I know your idioms.”