“Well, good-night, Marlay.”
“Good-night, sir. Thanks so much for letting me join you. Good-night, Mrs. Gray.”
And so, swiftly, almost brusquely, away, leaving them to the care and under the shadow of the commissionaire, man of legendary height and fabulous girth, whose huge gallantry cynically suggested that he would sell not only his own soul but the soul of the taxi and taxi-driver which he had summoned, if only to please this lady and this gentleman. But how could the commissionaire, so long trained in the observation of quick infidelities, guess that nothing in the world would please this obviously sensible gentleman but the love of this lady? whose maddening answer to his bitter-frantic demand, in that very taxi, was gently to touch his hand and whisper that it would surely be disloyal to past loveliness to pretend to things.... Magdalen Gray never, never pretended; maybe that is what kept her so young-looking.
CHAPTER IV
1
“Ivor, I’m so glad!” she welcomed him simply, the next night at half-past eight. She made no mention of the “dinner-party.” He and she were the dinner-party. Colonel Gray was again on his travels to “extremely foreign parts,” it seemed.
They were in the drawing-room before dinner, and he was too busy adjusting himself to her even to notice the pleasures of the room. He was glad that she was in black, he discovered a particular admiration for her in black; her dark simplicity was an almost startling decoration in the pale amber light of the July evening. And he enjoyed her hair, dark and thick and so soft, coiling about her ears and framing her wide, intelligent forehead and her mysterious, friendly eyes. So friendly.... And he liked being in her house, he particularly liked her in her own house—it somehow added solidity to her enchantment. He told her that, in those first few minutes. She had come to greet him from a far corner of the room, and he now stood above her in its very middle—dark, and seemingly self-confident, and not very young: and so compact of restraint—yes, he seemed very restrained—that she caught her breath with pleasure in him. It was most unusual in men....
But, with a gesture, she put a period to this dalliance—one shouldn’t palter so on an empty stomach, she might almost have said. And now she made fun of him, insisting on his being intelligently appreciative of her room of state. “My room, all mine,” she magnificently boasted. And she took him by the hand, miraculously lifting him to a pinnacle of comradeship, and twisted him to view the vast and rich expanse of her kingdom. But not all the craft and elegance of Sheraton and Chippendale, of Hepplewhite and Adam, had they been in that one room, could have seduced Ivor’s attention from this wonderful and sudden fact of friendship. For this between them was going to be friendship, a rich and immense friendship. He was going to insist on having her friendship, he wouldn’t let this go....
It was a small house, this in Wilton Place, but this room on the first floor was its room of state: it knew not the limitations of lowlier rooms, and stretched its dignity from front to back of the house. Its appointments were more than worthy of it: the darkish blue of the walls, a subtle quality of colour that mingled austerity with a sweet feminine glamour: the gilded craftmanship of the chairs and sofas and footstools and tables and what-nots, those lovely baubles of Louis Seize days which seem ever to coquette for your admiration the better to despise your favour, for they are not very comfortable: and the rich and fading brocades and velvets that covered them, stuffs of quality whose pride increases as their colour fades, velvets of worldly wisdom which know that there’s nothing in the world more assured of respect than velvets that are caressed by the gloss of respectful usage.... One hand lightly in his, her other swept round the room.
“There was a gentleman of Virginia, who lived in Kent,” she comically began; then very gravely: “very old he was, and fierce and contemptuous and gallant, and very, very odd in the way of his affections. For he said nothing, and for the ten years that he was my guardian he scarcely came near me—and then he died and left me all this and much besides!”