“He became a tender memory ... and I fell in love again, Raymond. But not as with my stone image, oh, no! This was the sort of man who didn’t count except in that I loved him, or thought I did. He was really no more than the servant of my reaction against the stone image, and to serve me well he had to help me demolish all the castles of sentiment I had built around him. And the stoutest and most beautiful castle of all I had built around that funny little Welsh inn! The memory of our days there haunted me: it made everything else seem not worth while, and so I told myself that something must be done about that, else it looked to be spoiling my whole life with regrets. Nothing in the world repeats itself except regret—and, of course, sardines. And so, Raymond, I set my horse to that last castle, to crash into it recklessly, gallantly, and to stride and laugh about its halls with another man, who was not a stone image, not so beautiful.
“We went, my reaction and I. In an exceedingly fast car we went, going ever so fast, so that when I tumbled out of it at that inn I had had no time to think. Now the sweetest thing in that little inn was its miniature dining-room, which was entirely composed of a large bow window and three little tables; and the largest thing about it was the view of the hills all round, and a brown stream which tumbled about at the bottom of the garden and made more noise than you could believe possible for so little a thing. My stone image and I had sat at the table by the bow window, and now my reaction and I sat there again. I dreamed, he ate. My back was to the door, and I sat facing a large mirror, the stream and the hills on my right; he sat facing the window, adoring me, the adventure, the hills, the food. I wasn’t unhappy; perhaps I was a little absent-minded, but I am sure I wasn’t unhappy—until, in the mirror in front of me, I saw the great figure, the fair hair, the frozen blue eyes, at the open door. Our eyes met in the mirror, the eyes of statues, wondering, waiting....
“Shall I tell you I was afraid, or ashamed, or intolerably miserable? I don’t know what I felt, it is a dead moment. I don’t know how long he stood there, filling the doorway with his great figure, filling my life with his stern eyes. But it couldn’t have been for long, perhaps a few seconds; and once he took his eyes off mine and looked at the man beside me, who hadn’t seen him. I thought his lips twitched, but then something happened to my sight, and the mirror clouded over. When I could see again, the door was closed, the magic mirror was empty of all but my unbelieving eyes and the profile of the man beside me, who didn’t know and was never to know that I had lived a century while he ate a potato.
“All that he did know was that the next morning I begged him to observe but not, please, to comment on my movements, which were in the direction of a London train. I treated that man abominably, abominably. But he never had a chance.... When I got home I found a wire. I had given orders for nothing, not even wires, to be sent on to me. This one had come an hour after I had left for Wales. It was from Southampton. ‘Just arrived. Am going straight up to the little place in Wales. Will arrive there dinner-time. Shall we dine together by the window?’”
Shelmerdene was rather absent-minded as she finished her story; she forgot to smile. It was very careless of Shelmerdene to forget to smile, for it made Raymond Paris feel shy; he fiddled with his pen; he coughed.
“Well,” said Shelmerdene, at last, “won’t that story do for you, Raymond? Or is it not interesting enough? Not enough action?”
“Of course, it’s frightfully interesting,” Raymond Paris protested. “But—well, you see, editors are rather odd. It isn’t a story at all, really, don’t you see....”
“An episode, perhaps?”
The young man started at a certain quality in her voice; something seemed to have suddenly broken in Shelmerdene’s voice. Wondering, he stared at the lady who stood above him by the table, her fingers playing thoughtfully with the ancient pink shagreen cigarette-case, which had once been vanity-box in chief to Marie Antoinette, so they said. And he followed her eyes out of the window into the garden below, the garden brave with the gay tall tulips of many colours. A man was walking in the garden, not heeding the tulips, not heeding anything, the back of a great figure of a man with a golf-bag swung across it, a lounging man with hands stuck very deep into plus-fours and a pipe screwed into the corner of his mouth; and the tall man’s hair was extraordinarily fair in the sunlight. George Tarlyon was walking through the garden of tulips on his way to a morning round of golf.
“Yes, an episode, that’s all it is,” said Shelmerdene queerly, and still her face forgot to smile. “That’s how he would think of it now. He has had his lesson, you see—and many episodes! And so all the childishness has gone out of him.... He can’t be hurt by a face in a mirror now, Raymond! He would just laugh, and he has an eighteenth-century kind of laugh. Poor lamb, all the childishness has been spilled out of him.”