“I’m becoming dissipated,” said Lady Sellingworth. “Three evenings out in one month! If I have one foot in the grave, I shall have the other in the Shaftesbury Theatre to-night.”
One of the young men, a fair, horsey-looking boy, with a yellow moustache, a turned-up nose, and an almost abnormally impudent and larky expression, laughed in a very male and soldierly way; the other, who was dark, with a tall figure and severe grey eyes, looked impenetrably grave and absent minded.
“Well, I shall die if I don’t have a good dinner at once,” said Mrs. Ackroyde. “Is that a Doucet frock, Beryl?”
“No. Count Kalinsky designed it.”
“Oh—Igor Kalinsky! Adela, we are in Box B. We must have a powwow between the acts.”
She looked from Lady Sellingworth to Craven and back again. Short, very handsome, always in perfect health, with brows and eyes which somehow suggested a wild creature, she had an honest and quite unaffected face. Her manner was bold and direct. There was something lasting—some said everlasting—in her atmosphere.
“I cannot conceive of London without Dindie Ackroyde,” said Braybrooke, as Mrs. Ackroyde led the way to the next table and sat down opposite to Craven.
And they began to talk about people. Craven said very little. Since the arrival of the other quartet he had begun to feel sensitively uncomfortable. He realized that already his new friendship for Lady Sellingworth had “got about,” though how he could not imagine. He was certain that the “old guard” were already beginning to talk of Addie Sellingworth’s “new man.” He had seen awareness, that strange feminine interest which is more than half hostile, in the eyes of both Lady Wrackley and Mrs. Ackroyde. Was it impossible, then, in this horrible whispering gallery of London, to have any privacy of the soul? (He thought that his friendship really had something of the soul in it.) He felt stripped by the eyes of those two women at the neighbouring table, and he glanced at Lady Sellingworth almost furtively, wondering what she was feeling. But she looked exactly as usual, and was talking with animation, and he realized that her long habit of the world enabled her to wear a mask at will. Or was she less sensitive in such matters than he was?
“How preoccupied you are!” said Miss Van Tuyn’s voice in his ear. “You see I was right. Golf ruins the social qualities in a man.”
Then Craven resolutely set himself to be sociable. He even acted a part, still acutely conscious of the eyes of the “old guard,” and almost made love to Miss Van Tuyn, as a man may make love at a dinner table. He was sure Lady Sellingworth would not misunderstand him. Whether Miss Van Tuyn misunderstood him or not did not matter to him at that moment. He saw her beauty clearly; he was able to note all the fluid fascination of her delicious youthfulness; the charm of it went to him; and yet he felt no inclination to waver in his allegiance to Lady Sellingworth. It was as if a personality enveloped him, held his senses as well as his mind in a soft and powerful grasp. Not that his senses were irritated to alertness, or played upon to exasperation. They were merely inhibited from any activity in connexion with another, however beautiful and desirable. Lady Sellingworth roused no physical desire in Craven, although she fascinated him. What she did was just this: she deprived him of physical desire. Miss Van Tuyn’s arrows were shot all in vain that night. But Craven now acted well, for women’s keen eyes were upon him.