It was addressed from Monte Carlo, and dated five days back. Ivor sat on the edge of the bed and read:—
“Dear Virginia,—I hope you won’t mind the liberty I’ve taken with the villa. I’ve closed it up and scattered the menials, as I gathered that you won’t be returning to this part of the country for some time, and being solitary host of a villa like a wedding-cake isn’t my strongest suit. Hugo and I moved on here, and haven’t enjoyed it as much as if you’d been here too. The ‘dicing’ hasn’t been going so well as it was—poor old Hugo came a crash the other night, and has gone clucking back for to be a toy soldier at Aldershot, saying that ‘dicing’ isn’t what it was in the early seventies and that he’s going to fight the Bolsheviks instead, for the only person who took his money with even a pretence of sympathy was a Grand Duke, who probably needed it himself. I’m leaving for London to-morrow, but as I’m only passing through Paris, where I suppose you are—you might have written to me, I do think!—I shan’t have time to look in on you. I shall stay at Belgrave Square, and look at London for a period, and then go down to Rupert Kare’s. In the meanwhile, should you suddenly feel the call of England in your blood and want to come home, be a dear and send me a wire to White’s, so that I can meet you with a couple of plovers’ eggs on a plate, it being the season for plovers’ eggs and you adoring same. Virginia, don’t tell me that you and I aren’t going to break an egg together at the Mont Agel this year! Remember that you would never have married me if I hadn’t drugged you with plovers’ eggs—and will so drug you again, Virginia, or my name isn’t George St. George, ever your lord but never my own master.”
Ivor folded up the letter, rather slowly and clumsily, with his one hand. Virginia was ready, radiant with the peculiar glitter of a very fair woman in a sleeveless black dress, and looking at him with that mischievous smile of hers. It put him rather on his guard, that smile.
“Odd man!” Ivor said thoughtfully. “Might have been written by a Dago, parts of that letter—and yet he’s the most gallant man in England.”
“Don’t you see that that is the way of his pride?” she pointed out. “He has a great deal of pride, and common sense too, but they’ve both somehow got motheaten in him. And so he writes in that casual and bantering way, as though nothing in particular had happened——”
“Well, it has,” Ivor said sharply.
“Now don’t be snappy, Ivor,” she begged him mischievously. “You and I know something most particular has happened, and so does George really, but he wouldn’t give that away, even to himself, not he! He thinks and writes about it in that unimportant way just so as to make it seem unimportant, something not at all serious. You see, he’s always been quite sure of his hold on me, and he can’t get out of that conceited habit all at once. Some Englishmen never think their wives can be unfaithful to them, not because they think so well of their wives but because they think so well of themselves. And so George simply can’t help thinking that I am only playing—we must give him a little time to realise that I’m not playing, Ivor,” she added gently.
“For him to realise that, or for you to realise that?” he asked, and put the light out of her eyes.
“You’ve got no right to say that!” Virginia cried.
He had meant to hurt, on a sudden impulse to lance a grievance that had risen within him; and now was shamed by her sincere anger, and would have pleaded his reason and begged her forgiveness, but she turned her head from him, and her face was set. And he told her unlistening face how he had noticed during the last two weeks, and divine weeks they had been, that she had avoided the subject of what they were going to do, the definite thing which was essential to people who weren’t babies. “Every time I wanted to talk about it,” he told her, “you somehow stopgapped me, and sometimes so cleverly that I forgot what I wanted to say in admiring you—but all the time I couldn’t help wondering why you avoided the subject, and feeling you must have some reason for that, a reason so weak that you didn’t dare let it out, for fear I might just laugh at you.” He smiled a little. “It’s been an uncomfortable feeling,” he explained. “Like a cold hot-water bottle.”