“They mock one,” Ivor said, “and then one hates oneself. It’s beastly....”
“Mockery!” There was a soft and remote meaning in the way it dropped from Virginia’s lips. “Mockery! that soft and sweet mockery of a man in first love—oh, Ivor, it’s the finest thing—at first.” Her wicker chair creaked loudly as she suddenly turned towards him, and his accustomed eyes could see hers through the darkness, wide eyes fashioned out of the mystery of the night, eyes sombre with query. “Have you ever felt that in a woman for you, Ivor?”
“Yes,” he said. And he nodded gravely: “but mine wasn’t only at first—it meant nice things all the time.”
There was a long silence. And then Virginia said:—
“I’d like to be dramatic in my speech just for once—please may I, Ivor? Though I’ve already been frightfully dramatic with you once, haven’t I? It’s most unusual in me, I assure you, Ivor.”
“I live alone,” Ivor said grimly, “so I do it quite a lot.”
“Well,” Virginia confessed sweetly, “I feel that there’s nothing so terrifyingly masculine and magnetic as the feline male. For that’s what he is, my beast! The perfect thing of his kind.... So very representative, Ivor, that he’s exceptional! In the dirt of cities, round about Shaftesbury Avenue maybe, it must be that kind of man, I suppose, that makes women do queer things for them, walk the streets and the like. They have a queer effect on women, my kind of beast. My particular one has made me put up with some odd things, I can tell you, Ivor! Standing aside and watching him make love. It was awful, awful, at first.... And then he sort of magnetises one by his perverse understanding of oneself, he forces one to treat him as he treats oneself. He judges people by his own beastliness, you see—and he’s so often right, Ivor! He’s so often been right about me....”
“And then,” she said, “he has queer, soft moments. He sometimes smiles at me from across a crowded room, in a most sweet and understanding way. And he seems to say: ‘Only you and I know what you and I are really like, and we’ll never tell any one—will we, Virginia’?”
“But I am telling someone now,” she said.
“I’m glad,” Ivor murmured.