“Used to be? I remember writing your name on an invitation to our reception.”
“Only I was out of town and missed it. Don’t you think that, because I did miss it, I’m entitled to see more of you now, to make up for what I lost?”
Dick, coming back to the table again, bore him out. “I remember telling Cecily that I was going to bring you to see her when you got back to town. He’s a great fellow, Cecily. One of our leading politicians—one of these amateur European generals! Never lets it interfere with business though, do you, Matt?”
Fliss and Matthew wandered back to their own table and Matthew, devoting himself to Fliss, apparently forgot the sudden interest he had taken in Cecily. He gave all his attention to Fliss, took her home, flattered her, laughed with her—gave Fliss the tingle of a thoroughly successful evening. Then he wandered home and read a book on French politics until he was half asleep. The European political situation was absorbing him these days since the war had begun. His rooms were full of war stuff, both English and French; “Land and Water,” full of Hilaire Belloc’s guarded prophecies, dozens of pamphlets, maps.
It was characteristic of him that he could read French—not in translation, not with the help of a dictionary, but fluently, with enjoyment and understanding. He could read it because he had wanted to so much and he understood the technique of wanting things until they became realized desires. He had wanted knowledge, success and friends and he had these things now in spite of an education cut cruelly short when he was sixteen, in spite of lack of money and of having been born in the obscurity of a little village. Through poverty and opposition he had quietly pushed his way and established himself. Carrington did not question him. He had been a successful young man when he came there. He had come to look after mining interests near Carrington and smaller interests in the city. Now he was wealthy and useful to the city in a hundred ways. They wanted him in politics and he gave some of the time which he might have had for leisure to that. But he would not let political interests absorb him. He advised, did some speaking, lent his influence where it seemed fit and let it go at that.
He had apparently never yet needed women or he would have managed to get the one he wanted, if he had followed the simple processes of his philosophy. Or perhaps he found his companionship with women in the books he read. On his laden, well-used bookshelves there were so many stories, poems, thoughts of beautiful women and noble women. Little contemporary fiction—it was the library of a man who had guided himself through literature, full of books which were cross references to each other, books which showed how his mind, setting out to pursue some line of thought, had gone off at a tangent on some philosophical quest. He needed no order or cataloguing of all his books; he could always put his hand on the one he wanted.
The rooms in which he lived were on the second floor of an old house which had been turned into an apartment building. There was an old-fashioned alcove in his living-room, and the circular walls were lined with books except where a long window cut into the structure of shelves. The rest of the living-room was furnished with a taste and skill which hit just the right note of spaciousness without seeming bare—a few easy-chairs, a dark red Turkish rug and a black oak table. It was on this table that he ate his meals, prepared for him by the Swedish woman who cooked and cleaned for him. There was a bedroom which was furnished almost with ascetic plainness, and that was all except for the kitchen and the room occupied by the cook. It was not an elaborate establishment for as wealthy a man as Matthew Allenby, but he had lived there in complete satisfaction for five years.
A week after the encounter at the Palladium he called on the Harrisons and found them at home. They were pleasant enough in their welcome and before half an hour he had justified himself for breaking in on one of their deliberately domestic evenings. He knew how to be entertaining, how to talk business with Dick in such a way that Cecily was not excluded from the conversation, how to make the conversation broaden itself into interesting fields outside of the specific ones in which the talk might begin. Dick enjoyed himself hugely. He had always liked Matthew Allenby and had various plans for business deals with him. Matthew was some years older and had drifted into the companionship of older men than Dick.
They talked war for the most part, as people did in 1915—with abstract enthusiasm, impersonal analysis. Then Cecily played for them. She played well, without brilliance, but with an accuracy and feeling for melody that the convent was directly responsible for. It was less her playing than the fact of her playing, the picture she made at the piano, singing and playing softly in the light of the tall candles which framed her, that was charming. The men watched her silently from across the room.
“I don’t want in the least to go home,” said Matthew, as Cecily turned to them finally. “I could sit here for days and days sipping this very remarkable liqueur that your husband is offering up and watching a very perfect picture of what homes may be—and rarely are outside of the Victrola advertisements.”