“I hope so,” said he. Then, after a short silence: “Let me be frank. What is going on at the back of your clever English mind is perfectly accurate. I am tempted to make love to you every time I see you. What man, with a man’s blood in his veins, wouldn’t be tempted, no matter how much he loved another woman? But I say to myself: ‘Lucien, you are French to the marrow of your bones. It is the nature of that marrow not to offend a beautiful woman by not making love to her. But, on the other hand, the Lady Olivia whose finger-tips I am unworthy to kiss’—he touched them with his lips, however, in the most charming manner—‘is English to the marrow of her bones, and it is the nature of that marrow to be offended if a man makes obviously idle love to her.’ So, not wishing to lose my Lady Olivia, whose friendship and sympathy I value so highly, I accept with a grateful heart a position which would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of my fellow-countrymen.”
“I’m so glad we’ve had this out,” said Olivia after a pause. “I’ve been a bit worried. A girl on her own has got to take care of herself, you know. And you’ve been so beautifully kind to me——”
“It’s because I am proud to call myself your humble and devoted servant,” replied Mauregard.
Olivia went to bed contented with this frank explanation. Men had already made love to her in a manner which had ruffled her serene consciousness, and she found it, not like Lydia Dawlish, a cynical game of wit, but a disagreeable business, to parry their advances. Bobby Quinton, of course, she could put into a corner like a naughty child, whenever he became foolish. But Mauregard, consistently respectful and entertaining, had been rather a puzzle. Now that way was clear.
For a while she did not associate her meeting Blaise Olifant with her distaste for the night club. In the flush of her new existence she had almost forgotten him. There had been no reason to correspond. His rent was paid through the Trivett and Gale office. His foraminiferous pursuits did not appeal to a girl’s imagination. Now and then she gave a passing thought to what was happening in her old home, and vaguely remembered that the romantically named traveller was there as a guest. But that was all. Now, the presence of Olifant had suddenly recalled the little scene in her mother’s room, when she had suddenly decided to let him have the house; he had brought with him a breath of that room; a swift memory of the delicate water-colours and the books by the bedside, the Pensées de Pascal and The Imitation of Christ. . . . Besides, she had felt a curious attraction towards the companion, the boy with the foreign manner and the glistening eyes and the suffering-stricken face. Both men, as she conceived them, belonged to the higher intellectual type that had their being remote from the inanities of dissipation. So, impelled by a muddled set of motives, she suddenly found herself abhorring Percy’s. She read herself into a state of chastened self-approbation, and then to sleep, with Rupert Brooke’s poems.
CHAPTER VII
OLIVIA sat by her little table, dispensing tea and accepting homage with a flutter of pleasure at her heart. She had been oddly nervous—she who had entertained the stranger Olifant, at Medlow, with the greatest self-confidence, and had grown to regard tea parties at the flat as commonplaces of existence. The two men had drifted in from another sphere. She had reviewed her stock of conversation and found it shop-worn after five months’ exposure. The most recent of her views on “Hullo, People!” and on the food at the Carlton had appeared unworthy of the notice of the soldier-scientist and the adventurous man of letters. She had received them with unusual self-consciousness. This, however, a few moments of intercourse dispelled. They had come, they had seen and she had conquered.
“At first I didn’t recognize you,” said Olifant. “I had to look twice to make sure.”
“Have I changed so much?” she asked.
“It was a trick of environment,” he said, with a smile in his dark blue eyes.