“I love the Ave,” Jane murmured over the saucepan, and then looked up at Eddy with her small, half-affectionate smile—a likeable way she had with her.
He said, “I do too,” and Arnold snorted.
“You don’t know him yet, Jane. He loves everything. He loves ‘Soap-bubbles,’ and ‘The Monarch of the Glen,’ and problem pictures in the Academy. Not to mention ‘The Penitent,’ which, Jane, is a play of which you have never heard, but to which you and I will one day go, to complete our education. Only we won’t take Sally; it would be bad for her. She isn’t old enough for it yet and it might upset her mind; besides, it isn’t proper, I believe.”
“I’m sure I don’t want to go,” said Sally, pouring out the egg into a dish. “It must be idiotic. Even Jimmy thinks so.”
Arnold’s eyebrows went up. “In that case I may revise my opinion of it,” he murmured. “Well, anyhow Eddy loves it, like everything else. Nothing is beyond the limit of his tolerance.”
“Does he like nice things too?” Sally naïvely asked. “Will he like ‘Squibs’?”
“Oh, yes, he’ll like ‘Squibs.’ His taste is catholic; he’ll probably be the only person in London who likes both ‘Squibs’ and ‘The Penitent.’ ... I suppose we shan’t see Eileen to-night; she’ll have been given one of the seats of the great. She shall come and talk to us between the acts, though.”
“We wanted Eileen and Bridget to come to supper,” said Sally. “It’s quite ready now, by the way; let’s have it. But they were dining with Cecil, and then going on to the theatre. Do you like cocoa, Mr. Oliver? Because if you don’t there’s milk, or lemonade.”
Eddy said he liked them all, but would have cocoa at the moment. Jane poured it out, with the most exquisitely-shaped thin small hands he had ever seen, and passed it to him with her little smile, that seemed to take him at once into the circle of her accepted friends. A rare and delicate personality she seemed to him, curiously old and young, affectionate and aloof, like a spring morning on a hill. There was something impersonal and sexless about her. Eddy felt inclined at once to call her Jane, and was amused and pleased when she slipped unconsciously once or twice into addressing him as Eddy. The ordinary conventions in such matters would never, one felt, weigh with her at all, or even come into consideration, any more than with a child.
“I was to give you James’ love,” Eddy said to Sally, “and ask you when you are coming to St. Gregory’s again. The school-teachers, he tells me to inform you, cannot run the Band of Hope basket-making class without you.”