“‘J—Jack,’ she stammered. The reason people hate that urbanity is because it’s a sort of subtle hypnotic.
“‘And he—ah, doesn’t bother you enough? Isn’t sufficiently courageous in his attitude of approach, I mean?’
“‘Oh!’ she threw up her hands with a little gesture of abandon. ‘He’s sufficiently courageous, I suppose; but he doesn’t see. Oh, I don’t know why I tell you all this, but it’s gone on so long now—our being just such good pals and all that—it—it’s getting on my nerves frightfully. And then this beastly wet afternoon’—— she laughed a bit hysterically. ‘Yes, yes; I’ll tell you. You see (she was twisting the jade elephant almost off its chain) this man I’ve known for ages—a year at least—and we’ve done everything together; I’ve always kept my best jokes for him, and my craziest hopes and plans, and—yes, I’m afraid my worst moods, too. He’s never seemed to mind somehow, no matter how disagreeable I’ve been, and—well, just lately I’ve found that—that I can’t go on being pals, that’s all. I daren’t even hint to him—I might lose everything, you see; and yet—oh, don’t you see, if he did care—and was perhaps in exactly my position—I’ve worn the mask so faithfully. If he did care——! Oh, Jim (but she was looking at the clumsy little elephant), isn’t it funny? Isn’t it funny, funny, funny!’
“And ’twas funny, now, wasn’t it? Nothing so frightfully funny as a real tragedy. Now I—I was just clown enough to snatch at one little ravelled end of her story, and try to match it up with a ragged corner of mine—that, you see, was where the delicious joke of it came in. Of course, I couldn’t be sure, but—something said slyly, ‘Why it’s you she means, can’t you see? It’s you, you blessed idiot, and everything’s coming out all shipshape.’
“Just the same, one can’t believe oneself just offhand like that—it seems so reckless; so I suggested, carelessly, you know, that she bring this tongue-tied impossibility to tea with me next day. In that way, I told her, I could see exactly how things stood (and I meant it more literally than she knew, by a good deal!); we’d tea at some Galleries—good place, I pointed out, for me to watch this Jack person, without his knowing it, and then (by this time my ridiculous tongue was fairly tripping itself up with expectation) she and I would have another talk, and decide her next move.
“‘Capital!’ she pronounced—a bit nervously, I thought at the time. ‘If only I can get hold of Jack for to-morrow——’
“‘Oh, well, if to-morrow turns out impossible, any day next week will be all right,’ I said cheerfully—the burning question being, of course, whether she would find it possible, any day, to produce this ‘Jack’—whom by the way I was beginning to care for quite foolishly—as one cares for oneself, don’t you know! ‘Say you meet him at the New, at four; have an hour for the pictures—which means anything you want to say to him, while I stroll quietly about after you—unobserved. Then we go to tea à trois, and—the game’s complete. At tea——’ I endeavored to look at her quite impersonally—‘I shall try to make you understand just what I think. It’s understood?’
“‘Yes.’ She drew a long breath. ‘Yes, I suppose it might as well be to-morrow as any other day. We can’t go on as we’ve been doing, that’s certain.’
“‘No,’ I said—my voice as leading man was quite good in this part, really! ‘No,’ I said, ‘we can’t. We must er—come to some new arrangement to-morrow.’
“But will you believe me, when I said good-bye to her, that detestable elephant actually leered at me; and for some unaccountable reason I was suddenly furious at his being named Jim. A senseless liberty, I thought it. However, when I was outdoors again, and walking home through Regent’s Park, I began to think less and less about the elephant; more and more about her peculiar nervousness and agitation. The way she’d answered me at first—‘it’s the one who isn’t bothering me—who hasn’t the perception to bother me, or doesn’t want to’—and all the time looking at that little jade elephant, whose name was Jim! Not such a bad elephant after all, I decided.