He’d had a glimpse of the essentially feminine point of view. We’re tremendously important as persons, he said to himself, but they’re just detached and amused about all our antics, whether we’re running a roulette or weighing the sun. We’re still spending half our time, in their eyes, scrambling in and out of the big nursery cupboard. Gladys plainly thought his grand deep philosophic pessimism—which she was obviously ready to lump with socialism and relativity and psychoanalysis and fascism and anything else she may have heard about—could be disposed of by talking it out, being only so much steam to be let off. And perhaps it was so much steam to be let off. Perhaps she was wiser than he was. It was all very fascinating; and one thing having this point of view described in books and quite another thing coming across it like this, suddenly seeing a fantastically coloured searchlight flashing out of a familiar sky. Here at his elbow was really another world; and it was soft, warm, and breathing, a person, somebody you could talk and laugh and cry with, not so very different in most things, indeed strangely like you. His thought, having raced round this little circle, suddenly stopped.
‘And if you’re cross now,’ she was saying, ‘then you’re no sport, and I don’t like you.’
‘I was never less cross,’ he cried. ‘The fact is, I’m all excited. Either there’s something very heady about a car that’s standing still or throwing that whisky away has made me drunk.’ He really did feel oddly exultant all of a sudden. ‘I think the spell must be working. Life’s suddenly changed from being a damned long dusty road into an enormous hamper, and I feel as if I’m trying to lift the lid now. Gladys, I want to give you a colossal hug.’
Her hands came down in front of her and then fluttered towards him. ‘Well,’ she said calmly, ‘if that’s how you feel, go on.’
She was in his arms and her face was tilted back, a few inches away. They kissed. Then her hand was passed over his cheek, and his arms tightened about her and they kissed again. It was all done very quietly and comfortably, without any of the blind fumbling and straining of a new passion, yet it had not only meaning but intensity. This intensity, however, like a slant of sunlight, had passed through a mellowing atmosphere of large friendliness.
Now, her hands pressing against him, she gently pushed herself away. Penderel drew a long breath. He wasn’t bewildered, he wasn’t ecstatic; he was suddenly and solidly happy. He felt enormously rich.
‘I didn’t mean that, you know,’ she remarked, ‘when I said you ought to do something.’
‘That’s a pity. No, it isn’t.’ It was funny. He was cool enough, and yet his voice wasn’t. It was hoarse, unsteady. ‘Well, I will do something now. I’ll start this week.’
‘Listen, Roger.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘Why don’t you come to London?’
‘I will. As a matter of fact, I’m on my way there now. That sounds damned odd, when you think of it.’