THE house stood in the corner of a quiet square, a little south and west of the Green Park, and the room in which most of his evenings were spent was on the balcony floor. The balconies had blossomed. They burst in a wreath of color round the grim quadrangle in festal imitation of the spring, when the newer beauties and the May buds were coming out; but before Jim South’s windows were only a few green shrubs, which died hard through the summer. He always admired his neighbors’ decorations, without noticing the deficiencies of his own; yet that garland round the old dark fronts often seemed to him like roses on a faded face; there lurked a sort of shame behind the sweetness; it was almost a trifling with age.
The square was a kind of back eddy to the Palace Road, and held a strained hum from the traffic round it. The silence, which raised the rents, had attracted South; he used more of it, he said, than most of those who paid them, farming it himself.
He meant that he was less often an absentee than those about him, but his phrase suggested an alternative of occupation which did not exist; for never was a man with less of harness on his back. He lived solely for his own amusement; cropping life’s greenness in a slow, easy, ruminant fashion, and on a modest income. A cousin was his nearest relative.
He had a fire this evening, though half May was past, and his book had dropped from his hand, when the man who was owner, factotum and, with his wife, comptroller to that small household of bachelors, announced:
“Miss Rosamond Merlin!”
It was a girl who entered; a girl with a woman’s buoyant movement and pose; a woman with a girl’s footfall. She wore a cloak which was somewhat oppressively magnificent, and held out a hand to South, laughing, as he rose.
“Surprised?”
“Delighted!” he said.