“I know what you are going to say,” she laughed, “but don’t. Besides, from you I should not know quite how to take it. You can be so satirical.”
I tried to look as though I could be, but in her case would not.
She let her ungloved hand rest for an instant upon mine. Had she left it there for two, I should have gone down on my knees before her, or have stood on my head at her feet—have made a fool of myself in some way or another before the whole room full. She timed it to a nicety.
“I don’t want you to pay me compliments,” she said, “I want us to be friends. Of course, in years, I’m old enough to be your mother.” (By the register I should say she might have been thirty-two, but looked twenty-six. I was twenty-three, and I fear foolish for my age.) “But you know the world, and you’re so different to the other people one meets. Society is so hollow and artificial; don’t you find it so? You don’t know how I long sometimes to get away from it, to know someone to whom I could show my real self, who would understand me. You’ll come and see me sometimes—I’m always at home on Wednesdays—and let me talk to you, won’t you, and you must tell me all your clever thoughts.”
It occurred to me that, maybe, she would like to hear a few of them there and then, but before I had got well started a hollow Society man came up and suggested supper, and she was compelled to leave me. As she disappeared, however, in the throng, she looked back over her shoulder with a glance half pathetic, half comic, that I understood. It said, “Pity me, I’ve got to be bored by this vapid, shallow creature,” and I did.
I sought her through all the rooms before I went. I wished to assure her of my sympathy and support. I learned, however, from the butler that she had left early, in company with the hollow Society man.
A fortnight later I ran against a young literary friend in Regent Street, and we lunched together at the Monico.
“I met such a charming woman last night,” he said, “a Mrs. Clifton Courtenay, a delightful woman.”
“Oh, do you know her?” I exclaimed. “Oh, we’re very old friends. She’s always wanting me to go and see her. I really must.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you knew her,” he answered. Somehow, the fact of my knowing her seemed to lessen her importance in his eyes. But soon he recovered his enthusiasm for her.