I pointed out that she couldn’t be much of a lady if he could ring her up at that unearthly hour; he warned me to leave his friends alone; I said I wouldn’t touch them at the end of a barge-pole, and then I composed myself to sleep. The taxi hurled itself across Hyde Park Corner, and dreamily I heard Tarlyon’s voice:
“I am not only going to telephone a lady, but I am going to insult a lady intolerably. And in case my invention should run low, I want you, Ralph, to stand by and suggest some more intolerable insults....”
And dreamily I heard Tarlyon’s voice:
“She keeps her telephone beside her bed, and so she must answer; and lo! I will insult her intolerably.”
The taxi stopped, and very soon the receiver was to his ear, while I leered at him from the depths of an arm-chair.
“Have some brandy,” said Tarlyon, but I sneered at him.
But what he said down the telephone, I cannot repeat. These things should only be spoken of privately, as between man and man. All I can do is to give a brief outline of his speech and a summary of the conclusions at which he arrived. He spoke at length of her character, of which he seemed to take an unfavourable view; he took grave exception to the manner of her life; and he begged her to hold him excused, in future, from any closer relationship than that of a distant acquaintance. She must have said he was drunk, for he denied any undue excess, while reserving to himself the right to think she was probably a secret drinker.
He began, I thought, rather subtly: on a matter which has been discussed between ladies and gentlemen ever since Solomon took a fancy to the Queen of Sheba and put off all dinner engagements for a week. In the gentlest way Tarlyon begged to be excused from dining with her on the following night. No, it was not that he had discovered a previous engagement; no, he couldn’t say that. The truth was, he said, that he had found something better to do; he hadn’t, he added, had to look very hard. He then proceeded to give his reasons for never wishing to see her again, and these he deduced (a) from flaws in her character, (b) from fissures in her temperament, and (c) from structural errors in her personal appearance. He pointed out that he was putting himself to this trouble only for her good, and in memory of his long friendship with her late husband, whom he had known ever since they were at Oxford and Cambridge together. I can only put down the fact that she did not ring off before she did to some fatal fascination in his voice, which was throughout smooth and reasonable in tone.
“That woman,” he explained, “is a very clever woman. She has the kind of brains that don’t generally go with beauty; and if I had any political ambitions, or any indoor ambitions of any kind, I would marry her like a shot. She has been thinking this last year that I might marry her, but I’ve just managed to keep the conversation off that. For, though one doesn’t deserve an angel, one needn’t marry a devil. Meanwhile, however, I’ve grown fond of her, and I’ve taken no trouble to hide from her that I admire her enormously; and so she has kept me dangling for a year, doing neither one thing or the other—indeed, why should she?—on the off-chance that I might marry her; for though Viscounts are not what they were, Ralph, a wealthy Viscount was to her mind just preferable to a wealthy Canadian of a certain age. And so she has kept poor old Cyrus Fall, who adores her, as I’ve known for the last ten months or so, hanging on as her second string, palming off that ghastly lie on him about a husband she never cared a damn about—she’s just kept him hanging on, while she waited to see whether I’d toe the line or not; and if not.... But I’m rather sorry about it all, Ralph, for she is a clever and amusing woman, and I shall miss begging her to put off Mr. Fall to dine with me.”
“Poor old Cyrus Fall!” I murmured. “But then—why poor? He adores the woman—no matter how cunning she is, he adores her. And so on....”