As she said that, I suddenly thought of Lord Dusiote's gallant villainy in Meredith's poem, and I told her quickly how a whole Court had been lovesick for a young princess, but Lord Dusiote had laughed, heart-free, and said:
"I prize her no more than a fling of the dice,
But oh, shame to my manhood, a lady of ice,
We master her by craft!"
"But I seem to remember that my Lord Dusiote came to a bad end," she laughed at me.
"Not so bad an end—it must have been worth it. And at least he died for a mistake, which is better than living on one:
"'All cloaked and masked, with naked blades,
That flashed of a judgment done,
The lords of the Court, from the palace-door,
Came issuing forth, bearers four,
And flat on their shoulders one.'"
But Lord Dusiote's gallant death left her quite cold, for she was suddenly by the bookcase, running caressing fingers over a binding here and there.
"What perfectly divine books you have! I shall read them all, and give up Ethel M. Dell for good—but you are probably one of those stuffy people who 'take care' of their books and never lend them to any one because they are first editions or some such rubbish."
"You can have them all," I said, "and you can turn up the corner of every page if you like, and you can spill tea on every cover or you can use them as table props, because all these books from Chaucer to Pater are absolute nonsense at this moment, for in not one of them is there anything about a dark-haired young woman with blue eyes and a tentative mouth, and the indolent caress of a Latin ancestress somewhere in her voice, standing on a doorstep in a dingy road, calling on a man who might quite easily be a murderer, for all you know."
But enough of that, for the situation of a young man and a young woman in a third-floor flat miles away from anywhere that mattered, at eleven o'clock on such a warm autumn night as makes all things seem unreal and beautiful, is a situation with a beard on it, so to speak.
When I first knew Phyllis, though always candid, she was inclined to be rather "county," the sort of woman "whose people are all Service people, you know"; she lived with her mother, near Chester Square, who at first disliked me because I was not in the Brigade of Guards, but later grew quite pleasantly used to me since I, unlike the Brigade of Guards, it seems, did at least acknowledge my habitual presence in her house by emptying Solomon's glory into her flower vases; and if there's a better reason than gratitude for getting into debt, tell it to me, please.