She didn't answer. There wasn't time, for at that moment we saw Terry coming towards us.
VI
He was very shy and nervous. He had decided at the last moment to accept her invitation, but he hadn't known where Rumpelmayer's was, and several bus-conductors had failed to give adequate information. (I think he expected something about as large as Selfridge's.) Anyhow, that accounted for the delay. He was sorry, and he hoped we hadn't been waiting long.
The awkward part of it was that I had to leave them almost immediately for an unpostponable duty in Fleet Street. It was unfortunate, I thought, because Helen might think I had invented the appointment in order to leave her alone with Terry. Perhaps she did; but at any rate she seemed not to care. "I hope you won't be late," she said, smiling as she shook hands with me. And then she summoned the waitress and gave a fresh order.
As I rode back on the top of a bus to Fleet Street, the whole interview seemed almost incredible. It was queer enough to find Terry breaking his cast-iron rules by having tea with her; but it was positively sensational for her to have calmly confessed to being in love with him, and for me to have comforted her with the assurance that being in love wasn't frightfully important. But that was the sort of thing she had power to do; she could have confessed murder, I believe, and have made you feel that murder wasn't frightfully important.
Often since then I have pondered over the matter and wondered what I ought to have done. Whatever it was, it was probably more heroic than what I did, which was merely to wait, telling myself over and over again that neither the one nor the other of them was a fool, and that there were certain things which only fools did....
VII
And so it began. The difficulty is to say what began. Terry told me so little, and Helen told me so much; and between the two was a vast hiatus of the inexplicable. At first, the affair seemed perfectly harmless. When a man, after habitually working three times as hard as he ought, slows down to twice as hard, there doesn't seem a great deal to complain of. Nor when the same man spends a wet Sunday afternoon listening to a pretty woman play Chopin, instead of drenching himself to the skin on some miserable hillside.
The whole thing is difficult to put into words because to this day I don't really know what happened. All I surmise is that the work of mutual conversion proceeded during the months of late winter and early spring—she attending his bacteriology lectures and he accompanying her to theatres, pianoforte recitals, and so on. Their meetings were frequent enough to stir gossip, no doubt, but hardly scandal, especially as it was so obvious that Severn knew and approved. Helen had always been in the throes of some fad or other, and he probably assumed that Terry was an unusually congenial successor of Christian Science, Dalcroze eurhythmics, highbrow drama, and a dozen other enthusiasms that had had their day and one by one crept silently to rest. It was he, more often than not, who might say to her: "Oh, by the way, I've got a card for Wolferton's private view—it's next Tuesday at the Savile Galleries. I shan't have time to go myself, but you might take Terry and show him the latest painted pot-boilers...." And she would take him, of course.
When I asked him if he had enjoyed going to that or some similar function, he would usually reply: "Yes, very much." Never more, and hardly ever less. It was Helen who assured me that the work of "humanizing" him was proceeding successfully.