Miss Van Tuyn, perhaps moved by the sudden, almost ferocious urgency of his loud bass voice, turned to have a last look at the woman who was “out for life”; but Cora was already lost in the crowd, and instead of gazing into the dead-white face which suggested to her some strange putrefaction, she gazed full into the face of a man. He was not far off—by the doorway through which people were streaming out into Regent Street—and he happened to be looking at her. She had been expecting to see a whiteness which was corpse-like. Instead she was almost startled by the sight of a skin which suggested to her one of her own precious bronzes in Paris. It was certainly less deep in colour, but its smooth and equal, unvarying tint of brown somehow recalled to her those treasures which she genuinely loved and assiduously collected. And he was marvellously handsome as some of her bronzes were handsome, with strong, manly, finely cut features—audacious features, she thought. His mouth specially struck her by its full-lipped audacity. He was tall and had an athletic figure. She could not help swiftly thinking what a curse the modern wrappings of such a figure were; the tubes of cloth or serge—he wore blue serge—the unmeaning waistcoat with tie and pale-blue collar above it, the double-breasted jacket. And then she saw his eyes. Magnificent eyes, she thought them, soft, intelligent, appealing, brown like his skin and hair. And they were gazing at her with a sort of sympathetic intention.
Suddenly she felt oddly restored. Really she had had a bad evening. Things had not gone quite right for her. She had saved the situation in a measure just at the end by taking refuge in irony. But in her irony she had been quite alone. And to be quite alone in anything is apt to be dull. Craven had let her down. Lady Sellingworth had not played the game—or had played it too well, which was worse. Garstin had been unusually tiresome with his allusions to the Royal Academy and his preposterous concentration on the Cora woman.
This brown stranger’s gaze was really like manna falling from heaven in a hungry land. She boldly returned the gaze, stared, trusting to her own beauty. And as she stared she tried to sum up the stranger, and failed. She guessed him a little over thirty, but not much. And there somehow, after the quick, instinctive guess at his age, she stuck.
“Come on, Beryl!”
Garstin’s deep strong voice startled her. At that moment she felt angry with him for calling her by her Christian name, though he had done it ever since they had first made friends—if they were friends—in Paris two years ago, when he had come to have a look at her bronzes with a French painter whom she knew well.
“You are going to walk back with me?”
“To be sure I am. He is devilish good looking, but he ought to be out of those clothes.”
“Dick!”
He smiled at her sardonically. She knew that he seldom missed anything, but his sharp observation in the midst of the squash of people going out of the cafe took her genuinely aback. And then he had got at her thought, at one of her most definite thoughts at least, about the brown stranger!
“You are disgustingly clever,” she said, as they made their way out, followed by the Georgians and their attendant cosmopolitans. “I believe I dislike you for it to-night.”