“I’ve spent the ‘much besides,’” she said.
“Dinner is served, madam,” a dim voice broke on them from the twilight of the room.
2
It is a commonplace that a young man in love is very apt to talk about himself. It is also a commonplace that the interest of an intelligent woman will seduce a young man into being exceedingly interested in himself. And so it wasn’t surprising—except, of course, to Ivor Marlay, who had always had a vague idea that commonplaces somehow didn’t, and somehow shouldn’t, apply to him—it wasn’t surprising that he did talk about himself, and at length, during and after dinner on that night in July, 1912. He needed some pressing, of course. Mrs. Gray was very good at pressing.
“For, after all,” she protested, “I know nothing at all about you—except that you are, well, curiously polished and literate, as though you had been educated abroad. But I do hope you weren’t!”
“I was five years at a public-school,” said Ivor, “so I’m quite self-educated.”
She rebuked him, for she was glad of the public-school. She liked her Englishmen to be English. She herself spoke foreign languages quite well enough for two, she said.
And then she led him on by her naïve surprise that he was, and intended to be, a writer. That seemed to her very charming, for he might so easily have been nothing at all, and with every excuse. (The charming things your Magdalens say are as nothing to those they suggest. But there are not many Magdalens.) She had had wide and intimate experience of writers, dramatists, and all manner of artists, so that she was not wildly excited at the fact of entertaining yet another. But that this young man was a writer, interested her happily; for he was so obviously something else as well, which was most unusual in writers. Magdalen Gray did not, as a rule, like writers and suchlike (by “suchlike” she, of course, meant publishers). She only dined with them when there was a “first-night” to go to, only lunched with them before a “private-view.” But she was too wise to explain her dislike by a generalisation, she just mentioned that she didn’t like them very much, especially the younger ones; and she suggested only that, perhaps, the word “I,” an enthralling word when sparingly used, occurred too often in their conversation: “which, on the other hand,” she said, “is very clever of them, for I can’t think how they can manage to squeeze it in so often.”
“But it’s not,” she said, “the most important thing in the world to be clever.”
“No,” Ivor agreed, and felt grave.