Then we had tea (the cake in a silver basket on a fringed mat, if you please!), and after we had talked a little more, we said good-bye, and Peter took us out. He had rushed out of the room just five minutes before, when the first symptoms of leave-taking manifested themselves, and we saw why, when we passed out through the first room where the gramophone was. It played us out with “The Wedding March,” surely a graceful thought of Peter Ball’s!
“He’s very nice, but what a pity he hasn’t got taste!” I said as we came away. You see, I am used to Cinque Cento House, and I have always been told that there is only one taste, and that ours is it.
“Taste!” Christina mooned, as we got into a ’bus. “There’s so much of it about, isn’t there? On my word, it will soon be quite chic to be vulgar.”
It was not difficult to tell which way the wind was blowing after that. It was about this time that Mr. Aix found Christina typing her own name and Peter’s on a sheet of III Imperial. He hadn’t even set eyes on Peter Ball then, but he did a few days later, when Peter Ball came to tea, holding his grey kid gloves in his hand. George, luckily, was out again, really out, not pretending to be in his study, and Mr. Aix it was who opened the front-door for Peter when he went away at seven.
“A man!” he said, when he came back to us all in the winter garden, and Christina was just going out—escaping to her own room to think over Peter Ball, I dare say—and she said as she passed him—
“I could hug you for saying that, Mr. Aix.”
“No, you couldn’t,” said he. “I am popularly supposed to be repellent. A lady said I was like a white stick of celery grown in a dark cellar. Another, of music-hall celebrity, compared me to a blasted pipe-stem. I do not look for success with your sex. It was kind of you to think of it, though.”
Peter Ball meant business, or else we could not have all spoken of it so openly. George was awfully cross at the idea of having to find a new secretary. Lady Scilly said she thought he could do better than Christina, who was too forward (and too pretty). She tried very hard to flirt with Peter herself, but perhaps Peter thought he could do better, and wouldn’t. She looked into his face and said, “You great big beauty!” She told him “high” stories, as Christina and I call them, and he wouldn’t laugh. She asked him right out why he wouldn’t, and he answered equally right out, “Because I disapprove of all jesting with regard to the relations of the sexes!”
Lady Scilly looked disgusted, and left him severely alone, as he meant her to.
For weeks after this he was like a full pail of water one is afraid to carry without spilling. At last he slopped over, and asked Christina to be his wife. I wasn’t in the room, of course, but Christina was nice and told us afterwards. He went on his knees, she says, and I believe her, because I found a cushion on the floor immediately after, before the housemaid had tidied the room, and I think he had managed to put it under his knees without her seeing. Our floor is bony.