Successfully as Miss Goodward had kept for Peter during the day his new relation to his wealth on the one hand and society on the other, she seemed that evening quite to have abandoned him. While the family was having coffee on the terrace after dinner, she slipped away from them to reappear lower down among the rose trees, her white dress gathering all that was left of the lingering glow. The junior partner, feeling himself never so much junior, though he knew it was but a scant year or two, sat on through Lessing's inconsequential comment on business and the day's adventures, hearing not a word; now and then his chair creaked with the intensity of his preoccupation. It grew dusk and the lamps blossomed in the house behind them; presently Clarice slipped away to the children and the evening damp fell over the rose garden. Peter could endure it no longer. He believed as he rose suddenly with a stretching movement that he meant merely to relieve the tension of sitting by pacing up and down; it was unaccountable therefore that he should find himself at the edge of the terrace. He wondered why on earth Clarice couldn't have helped him a little, and then as if in response to his deep instinctive demand upon her, he heard her call softly to her husband from the door of the house. At the scrape of Julian's chair on the terrace tiling, Peter cast away his cigar and hurried into the dusk of the garden.
He found her at last by the herbacious border, keeping touch with the flight of a sphinx-head moth along the tall white rockets of phlox. Peter whipped out his handkerchief and dropped it deftly over the fluttering wings. In a moment he had stilled them in his hand. Miss Goodward cried out to him:
"You've spoiled his happy evening!"
"He's not hurt...." Peter laid the moth gently on a feathery flower head, and the tiny whispering whirr began again. "I thought you wanted him."
"I did—but not to catch him," Miss Goodward explained. "I wanted just to want him."
"Ah, I'm afraid I'm one of those people with whom to want a thing is to go after it," Peter justified himself.
"So one gathers from what one hears." She brushed him as lightly with the compliment as with the wings of a moth. "I wasn't really wanting him so much as I was wanting to be him for a while. Just to pass from one lovely hour to another and nothing to pay! But we humans have always to pay something."
"Or some one pays for us."
"Well, isn't that worse ... taking it out of somebody else?"
"I'm not so sure; some people enjoy paying. It's not a bad feeling, I assure you: being able to pay. Haven't you found that out yet?"