It was darkening; and it was as she was about to leave him that he suddenly asked her:—
“I say, Virginia, do you remember being made to copy out in your first copy-book as a child that marvellous sentence: ‘When gentlefolk meet, compliments are exchanged’? Do you remember, Virginia?”
“That’s us to-day,” he explained.
Her eyes contracted just a little, quizzically. And with her head a little sideways, she examined him. She was curiously detached, this Virginia, yet curiously warm....
“Yes, but that’s not me, Ivor. It’s not my nature.” And it was as though she wanted to tell him an ulterior something; but there was no time, it was quickly darkening; the horse stamped eagerly, and she swung away with it. “I’m not like that at all, really, Ivor,” she said swiftly. “It’s you who draw it out of one ... maybe.”
“That’s your particular quality, Ivor,” she cried to him, a woman on a horse, going away. Strangely come, strangely gone! He stared after her through the hedge, a swaying figure through the darkening parkland. A shadow astride a horse ... so fair and gallant! She turned and waved a hand to him, she cried a word, but he didn’t hear it, it was a lost word. A sable wraith she was in the parkland, fading away into the dolorous crypt of winter. She was a symbol for something....
And Ivor thought: “O mystic and sombre Virginia....”
And he wondered if he would see her again. He wondered.... And he didn’t know. He knew nothing about this Virginia—whom he had thought he had judged so well! And as he strode homewards through the chill gloom he mocked the judgments of his early “twenties” a little viciously. “Christ, how they must have loathed me!” he thought.