And there were others who came once and never again, but whom she never forgot. But for some of these last, indeed, she would never have remembered some of the former. The brown-eyed youngster with the sentimental expression and the funny little moustache, for example, lurked in the ruck a long time before the one and only visit of a bird of passage dignified him in the sight of the girl on the high stool.
On the occasion of his first appearance (but that was long ago, Sofia couldn’t remember how long) the slender young man with the soulful eyes and the insignificant moustache had commended himself to her somewhat derisive attention by seeming uncommonly exquisite for that atmosphere.
The Café des Exiles was little haunted by the world of fashion; its diner á prix fixe (2/6), although excellent, surprisingly well done for the money, did not much seduce the clientèle of the Carlton and the Ritz. Now and again its remoteness, promising freedom from embarrassing encounters save through unlikely mischance, would bring it the custom of a clandestine couple from the West End, who would for a time make it an almost daily rendezvous, meeting nervously, sitting if possible in the most shadowy corner, the farthest from the door, and holding hands when they mistakenly assumed that nobody was looking—until the affair languished or some contretemps frightened them away.
Aside from such visitations, however, the great world coldly passed the café by; although it couldn’t complain for lack of patronage, and in fact prospered exceedingly if without ostentation on the half-crowns of loyal Soho and more fickle suburbia.
The Sohobohemian on its native heath and the City clerk on the loose, however, were not prone to such vestments as young Mr. Karslake affected. It wasn’t that he overdressed; even the ribald would have hesitated to libel him with the name of a “nut”—which is Cockney for what the United States knows as a “fancy (or swell) dresser”; it was simply that he was always irreproachably turned out, whatever the form of dress he thought appropriate to the time of day; and that his wardrobe was so complete and varied that he seldom appeared twice in the same suit of clothes—except, of course, after nightfall; though his visits to the Café des Exiles for dinner or afterward were so infrequent that each attained (after Sofia began to notice him at all) the importance of an occasion. Luncheon was his time, and those empty hours at the end of the afternoon which London fills in with tea and Soho with drinks.
He seemed to have a very wide and catholic acquaintance among people of all ranks and stations in life; one could hardly call them friendships, for he lunched or sipped an aperti not often with the same person twice in a blue moon. And whether his companion were a curate or some ragged wastrel of the quarter; painted young person from the chorus of the newest revue or proper matron from Bayswater; keen adventurer from Fleet Street or solid merchant from the City, his attitude was much the same: easy, impersonal, unaffected, courteous, detached. He was as apt as not (going on his facial expression) to be mooning about Sofia when his guest was gesticulating wildly and uttering three hundred words a minute. When he spoke it was modestly, in a voice of agreeable cadences but pitched so low that Sofia never but twice heard anything he said; and his manner was not characterized by brisk decision. All the same, one noticed that he had, as a rule, the last word, that what he said left his hearer either satisfied or pensive.
He was unmistakably silly about Sofia; though that didn’t impress her, too many of the regulars were just as hard hit, one more or less didn’t count. But he never stared to the point of rudeness, and it always seemed to make him hugely uncomfortable if she appeared in the least aware of his adoration; and Mama Thérèse and Papa Dupont never even noticed him, so circumspect was he. Still, Sofia saw, and sometimes wondered, just as she wondered now and then about most of the possible men who seemed disposed to be sentimental about her.
For there were times when she felt she could do with a little more first-hand experience and a little less second-hand knowledge.
Love (she supposed) must be a very agreeable frame of mind to be in, it was so generally vogue....
What first led her to think that Mr. Karslake might be an interesting person to know, entirely aside from his admiration, happened on an afternoon in June, a warm day for England, when a temperature of some 81 degrees was responsible for “heat-wave” broadsides issued by the evening papers.