"I haven't, even now, the least sympathy with myself. Nor would I have with you, say, if you had grossly bungled your affairs in the same way. It's a deficiency for which there is not the shadow of an excuse, that mean, ungenerous, deficiency which blinds a man to the necessities of his own happiness—until, since life is always farce or melodrama, it's too late!
"She did not write to me. The 'sometime' of her concession faded with the months into a dream, perhaps to come true, sometime!... I wrote only once to her, a dishonest letter, which I did my best to fill with the spirit of my past—and how long passed!—'avuncular' relations with her. And yet nothing happened since the day when the Queen of Sheba had come to Solomon with 'one fat worry,' nothing at all! Not even the first syllable of a word of love—not, by a thousand miles, even the shadow of an attempted or desired kiss! Only, to account for it all, a voice on a telephone one night, a so familiar voice changed by magic.... Changed in itself or in my mind? I simply didn't ask! But, however it was, from that strange thing the god worked a stranger, for I knew that when she read that letter she would know that it was dishonest, unreal.
"She must have known! Or else, sixteen months later.... That 'sometime' letter of hers had come at last! A treasure, stamped from Vienna where (so Mrs. Richmond had written me from Tonbridge, her new home since the disposal of the house of Rutland Gate) Carlo was now attached. It was a very short letter something like this:
"'I am coming to England for a week,' she wrote, 'to see mother in her new home in the country. But, if you don't mind, there are other folk I would like to see, too!... Carlo is getting more and more of a personage, and simply can't leave Vienna, so I won't be able to stay away more than a week, from next Thursday as ever is, Howard! But as I don't know what day I will be in London, you will please institute no inquiries about me until you hear from me. I will ring you up at about 10:30 on any of my seven nights, so that we can arrange to meet somewhere. Of course, I could write to you, but I want to wonder, as I take up the receiver, whether you will recognise my voice. But you won't dare not to, will you, Howard?' That is only a reason in a letter, I said to myself, for I can hear her adding, 'And so, my dear, if there's anything gay enough to keep you out after ten-thirty on any of those nights, then you will miss Fay—now won't you?'
"Thursday came. And then came those other days and nights, and passed! Each one tingling with hope, until half-past ten, and then—oh, it's a misery unlike any other, that waiting for a bell that doesn't ring! It is a cruel game to play upon a man, that exaltation of hope to hear a voice, and then that helpless misery, with no remedy but what he can find in cigarettes. I paced many miles of carpet those six evenings.
"Thursday again. I dined alone, and then, telling Briggs that he could take his evening out, opened a book, and read grimly. I can't remember anything in my life like the bitter, dismal anger of that night. It's a vivid sore even now, that last vigil by my fire with mind and heart telling me that I had been cruelly played with, like a beast in a cage. I didn't love the less, I couldn't; indeed it was my love that was measured by my bitter grievance.... And even if I do hear her voice to-night, I wasn't spared from realising, it will be too late to see her—'to arrange to meet somewhere,' she had written!—for she will be leaving to-morrow.
"One can act very well in one's own bitter company. Even as the clock in my little hall struck the half-hour after ten I pretended to read grimly on.... I've explained all this waiting to you because it seems to reflect quite importantly on my behaviour that night. It can't but account for it in a sort of way—and as for excusing it, well I don't care a button for that!
"I suppose it was about a quarter of an hour later that the door-bell rang. Briggs was out, as I've said, and I had not the faintest intention of answering it, for it could only be a casual caller wanting a drink. But the bell rang again, furiously—and this time, without a second's hesitation, I threw aside my book, strode into the hall, and flung open the door.
"'You beast!' I said with all my heart, quivering.