“But I like it like that!” cried Ivor.
“It all comes from the progress of science,” said Trevor. “All this easy infidelity and messing about. One is not protesting against a woman liking some one else, one is protesting against the chances of her liking some one else. The chances are so against one....”
“There are too many facilities for getting about,” he said. “A man nowadays has got very little chance of keeping a woman to himself as compared to even eighty years ago. She gets more chances of seeing other men, and comparing and developing and evolving—away from you. In the old days, if you lived at Wimbledon—well, why not?—your wife never met a soul without your knowing about it. Infidelity was a lengthy and ponderous business—it simply isn’t possible to snatch a quiet half-hour with a young man while your coach and footmen are waiting outside. But now, motors, undergrounds, telegrams, telephones! All modern life is directed towards letting your wife or mistress see as many men as she likes and when she likes. And out of those men how easy to meet one she likes as much as, and then more than, you. The way women go about finding Magnetism in impossible men is appalling! So where the devil are you? There’s no security, Ivor, simply none! A lover is a husband and then a cuckold before he knows what and where he is. And then people say the telephone service is too slow!”
“The pleasant thing about you, Gerald,” Ivor suddenly broke in, “is that you never speak of women as though you had been loved by them, but always as though you had done all the loving. It’s a very pleasant fiction, that....”
“The matter is, of course,” said Trevor reasonably, “that one wants rather too much. One wants a simple and direct love spiced with the divine and complex subtleties of a Cleopatra—and the two can’t go together at all. One wants the love and constancy of a dairymaid and the lust and pride and wit of a great lady....”
It was at that very moment, as Ivor Marlay will always remember, that he first heard the voice of Magdalen Gray, and was arrested by it. Trevor and he were still standing at the long table with their backs to the room and bunches of people, and Trevor was just thoughtfully exploring the bottle for what it might still contain—when the voice, but a phantom of a passing voice borne above the clatter of the room by some peculiarly light quality in it, suddenly caressed Ivor’s ear: like, he thought, a very sweet unscented breeze from the shadows of a green place to a sweating road where two men are breaking stones, for Trevor’s worldly wisdom is made of stones.... He looked round and peered among the accustomed faces round about, but he couldn’t hit on the face of the voice, nor the “Rodney” to whom it had been addressed.
“A pleasant voice, that,” he only said to Trevor—so little thinking that Trevor had also heard it, that he was very surprised when he returned:—
“Yes, isn’t it! A voice in this wilderness. Did you see her?” And Trevor looked round the room, keen eyes searching swiftly. Gerald Trevor was very popular—among men as among women, for all his “hatred”—and many eyes caught his and beckoned gaily, a voice here and there called “Gerald!” and a few men wondered what on earth Trevor found to say at such length to that rather mysterious young man, Marlay. They quite liked Marlay, he seemed and looked quite all right, but they weren’t, absurdly enough, quite sure whether he liked them! And that vague doubt is a most improper one for a young man to instil, no matter how vaguely, in other men. Thus, throughout his life Ivor was to find that it was to be made always much easier for him to be unpopular rather than popular. His was a nature to like a few people and be entirely indifferent to every one else; and very few people were to matter in his life, but they were to matter very much. As now, when Gerald Trevor, at five-and-forty, who was every one’s easy acquaintance and no one’s particular friend, was surprisingly Ivor’s good friend, and was steadfastly to remain so. For it is the consolation and distinction of a man whose instinct is to like very few people to be instinctively liked by those very few.
“She must have just passed through and gone upstairs,” Trevor said at last. “Anyway, she belongs to a generation that doesn’t loiter in bars, not even when they’re called buffets....”
“She loiters secretly,” he said mischievously, “and in secret places—which, after all, is what loitering is for.”