“Your mother always did like pretty things—I know she admires Claudia—but she was always unduly swayed by good looks, even at school. I know how deceptive they are. A man told me the other day that his wife had left him and been through the Divorce Court, and he attributed it entirely to her good looks. ‘A very pretty woman is difficult to live with,’ he said; ‘she gets a great deal of adulation and flattery in Society, and naturally the husband at home falls rather flat.’ There is a lot of truth in that, Mr. Paton.”
“Perhaps he was the typical English husband who, as soon as he has won a wife, forgets to be her lover,” replied Paton. “You are very careful and precious of your rare china, Lady Currey.”
His vis-à-vis stared. She wondered that Paton, who was usually so smooth in conversation, should make such a sudden jump. But it served to divert her mind from Claudia.
“I had such luck last week. I was walking along the High Street in Moulton and I caught sight of a pair of vases. I thought that powder blue could be nothing less than Chinese. They had blue and white reserves on them. You know what that means. I got them for a mere song, and they’re beauties. Since I last saw you I have bought....”
Still talking china, Paton saw her into a taxi.
He strolled away from the restaurant. It was warm and sunny, and the pedestrians seemed all in a good humour. Paton often wandered for hours through the streets of London, finding in that wonderful panorama food for eyes and brain and heart. He loved the feeling that he was part of the crowd, and his mind was stored with many observations and memories. The romance of the streets was no idle journalistic phrase to him. He felt it around him on all sides, plucking at him with alluring fingers leading him into the land of dreams. Often at night he would give himself wholly up to its enchantment, wandering along mile after mile through quaint byways and on misty commons, through silent Suburbia and the noisy, restless East-end slums. London was to him a book of unending pages with countless illustrations.
This afternoon he mingled with the crowd, but he did not heed it, so that he did not see a woman in a motor energetically waving her hand to him and directing the chauffeur to stop.
“Mr. Paton—oh! Mr. Paton, what a day-dream!”
It was Claudia herself, looking altogether charming in light summer attire. There were waving, greeny-blue ostrich feathers in her Leghorn hat and around her neck. The softness of the feathers and the peculiar shade of blue accentuated the creamy tint of her skin and the brightness of her eyes. Her happiness shone through the envelope of the flesh like a flame through clear glass. A heavy-eyed woman of the lower classes who was passing marked her and muttered, “She has a good time, I’ll be bound,” then, wrapped in her own bad one, passed on.
Paton went up to the car and held out his hand.