“All right,” she said, almost absently. “George will let me divorce him—yes, we can manage that. He’s got a lot of common sense hidden away somewhere....” She got up from her chair with a sudden little shake. “That’s settled then, Ivor. No more talk about it, please—oh, please!” she suddenly pleaded in her breathless little voice. “Let’s have our summer, and then in the autumn we can get down to this business of arrangement and divorce—down from our mountains, Ivor, right down!” Her eyes seemed clouded, he had a queer idea that she was going to cry; but she didn’t, she picked up a tube of lip-salve from the toilet-table and took it to her lips, and then on a sudden thought held it away again.
“Will you kiss me before or after?” she asked.
And he did whatever it was suitable for him to do.
3
The corridors of a hotel at the hour of nine-fifteen at night are consecrated to the activities of valets de chambre: it is at that mysterious hour, when the quality are at dinner or the play, that the white-aproned valets raid their bedrooms and rudely snatch away their clothes; and, with jackets and trousers screwed deftly under their arms, go searching the most noisome holes of the hotel for boot-brushes and oily rags with which to dust and clean them.
But to-night the last of messieurs et mesdames were late in their descent. And it was as the valets were waiting in a little group about a bedroom door, in final gossip before the raid, that there passed them down the corridor two silent dandies: a very fair lady—“Ah, ce type anglais!”—and a very tall, beak-nosed, clean-shaven man with one arm and a white flower brave on the silk lapel of his smoking. The white-aproned group stared after monsieur et milady; they saw the hand of the fair lady suddenly laid upon the sleeve of the tall gentleman, and the way she raised her head to him and spoke words which, they saw, the dark profile was quite helpless to answer.
“Elle l’aime, vous savez,” said the doyen of the valets, a wise man.
“Elle s’amuse, mon vieux,” sneered a young Italian with a broken nose; but his heart had been broken too, several times.
Now these were the sudden words of the fair lady, which her companion was quite helpless to answer.
“I want a baby,” she said. “I need a son—frightfully!”