“I—perhaps you—I don’t find it easy now to think that anyone can care much to be bothered with me.”
“Oh—Lady Sellingworth!”
“That really is the truth. Believe it or not, as you like. You see, I am out of things now.”
“You need never be out of things unless you choose.”
“Oh, the world goes on and leaves one behind. Don’t you remember my telling you and Beryl once that I was an Edwardian?”
“If that means un-modern I think I prefer it to modernity. I think perhaps I have an old-fashioned soul.”
He was smiling now. The hard look had gone from his eyes; the ice in his manner had melted. She felt that she was forgiven. And she tried to put the thought of Camber out of her mind. Beryl was unscrupulous. Perhaps she had exaggerated. And, in any case, surely she had treated, was treating, him badly.
She felt that he and she were friends again, that he was glad to be with her once more. There was really a link of sympathy between them. And he had been angry because she had gone abroad without telling him. She thought of his anger and loved it.
That day, after tea, while the music was still going on in Dindie Ackroyde’s drawing-room, they drove back to London together, leaving their reputations quite comfortably behind them in the hand of the “old guard.”