“A wonderfully clever woman,” he continued. “I’m afraid I disappointed her a little though.” He said this, however, with a laugh that contradicted his words. “She would not believe I was the Mr. Smith. She imagined from my book that I was quite an old man.”
I could see nothing in my friend’s book myself to suggest that the author was, of necessity, anything over eighteen. The mistake appeared to me to display want of acumen, but it had evidently pleased him greatly.
“I felt quite sorry for her,” he went on, “chained to that bloodless, artificial society in which she lives. ‘You can’t tell,’ she said to me, ‘how I long to meet someone to whom I could show my real self—who would understand me.’ I’m going to see her on Wednesday.”
I went with him. My conversation with her was not as confidential as I had anticipated, owing to there being some eighty other people present in a room intended for the accommodation of eight; but after surging round for an hour in hot and aimless misery—as very young men at such gatherings do, knowing as a rule only the man who has brought them, and being unable to find him—I contrived to get a few words with her.
She greeted me with a smile, in the light of which I at once forgot my past discomfort, and let her fingers rest, with delicious pressure, for a moment upon mine.
“How good of you to keep your promise,” she said. “These people have been tiring me so. Sit here, and tell me all you have been doing.”
She listened for about ten seconds, and then interrupted me with—
“And that clever friend of yours that you came with. I met him at dear Lady Lennon’s last week. Has he written anything?”
I explained to her that he had.
“Tell me about it?” she said. “I get so little time for reading, and then I only care to read the books that help me,” and she gave me a grateful look more eloquent than words.