"My word, that car was never out of the shop before," Julian was saying. "He's a goner!"
"And that lovely, dusty, brown colour that goes so well with her hair! Who would have thought Peter would be so noticing."
"It couldn't have cost him a cent under seven thousand." Julian was certain, "and carrying it off with me the way he did—bought the six cylinder after all, he had.... I'll bet old Peter don't know a cylinder from a stomach pump."
Clarice was evidently going on with her own line of thought. "It will be the best thing that ever happened to Eunice if she can only be got to see it."
"Well, if she don't her mother will see it for her." Lessing's voice died into a subdued chuckle as Peter passed under it on the dew-damp lawn, but there was no revelation in it for the junior partner. He had already found out what was the matter with him and what he meant to do about it.
III
Whatever the process of becoming engaged to Eunice Goodward lacked of dramatic interest, it made up to Peter by being such a tremendous adventure for him to become engaged to anybody.
He had gone through life much as his unfriended youth had strayed through the city streets, aching for the walled-up splendour—all the world's chivalries, tendernesses, passions—known to him only by glimmers and reflections on the plain glass of duty. Now at a word the glass dissolved and he was free to wander through the rooms crammed with imperishable poets' wares. He walked there not only as one who has the price to buy, but himself made one of the splendid things of earth by this same word which her mere being pronounced to him.
He paid himself for years of denials and repressions by the discovery of being able to love in such a key. For he meant quite simply to marry Eunice Goodward if she would have him, and it was no vanity which gave him hope, but a tribute to her fineness as being able to see herself so absolutely the one thing his life waited for. He knew himself, modestly, no prize for her except as he was added to by inestimable passion. Whatever she saw in him as a man, for her not to recognize the immortal worth of what he was able to become under her hand, was to subtract something from her perfections. In her acceptance would lie the Queen's touch, redeeming him from all commonness.