we met at a dinner. it was at a house the tarvrilles had taken for the season in mayfair. the drawing-room was a big white square apartment with several big pictures and a pane of plate glass above the fireplace in the position in which one usually finds a mirror; this showed another room beyond, containing an exceptionally large, gloriously colored portrait in pastel—larger than i had ever thought pastels could be. except for the pictures both rooms were almost colorless. it was a brilliant dinner, with a predominating note of ruby; three of the women wore ruby velvet; and ellersley was present just back from arabia, and ethel manton, lady hendon and the duchess of clynes. i was greeted by lady tarvrille, spoke to ellersley and lady hendon, and then discovered a lady in a dress of blue and pearls standing quite still under a picture in the opposite corner of the room and regarding me attentively. it was mary. some man was beside her, a tall grey man with a broad crimson ribbon, and i think he must have spoken of me to her. it was as if she had just turned to look at me.
constantly during those intervening months i had been thinking of meeting her. none the less there was a shock, not so much of surprise as of deferred anticipation. there she stood like something amazingly forgotten that was now amazingly recalled. she struck me in that brief crowded instant of recognition as being exactly the person she had been when we had made love in burnmore park; there were her eyes, at once frank and sidelong, the old familiar sweep of her hair, the old familiar tilt of the chin, the faint humor of her lip, and at the same time she seemed to be something altogether different from the memories i had cherished, she was something graver, something inherently more splendid than they had recorded. her face lit now with recognition.
i went across to her at once, with some dull obviousness upon my lips.
"and so you are back from africa at last," she said, still unsmiling. "i saw about you in the papers.... you had a good time."
"i had great good luck," i replied.
"i never dreamt when we were boy and girl together that you would make a soldier."
i think i said that luck made soldiers.
then i think we found a difficulty in going on with our talk, and began a dull little argument that would have been stupidly egotistical on my part if it hadn't been so obviously merely clumsy, about luck making soldiers or only finding them out. i saw that she had not intended to convey any doubt of my military capacity but only of that natural insensitiveness which is supposed to be needed in a soldier. but our minds were remote from the words upon our lips. we were like aphasiacs who say one thing while they intend something altogether different. the impulse that had brought me across to her had brought me up to a wall of impossible utterances. it was with a real quality of rescue that our hostess came between us to tell us our partners at the dinner-table, and to introduce me to mine. "you shall have him again on your other side," she said to lady mary with a charming smile for me, treating me as if i was a lion in request instead of the mere outsider i was.
we talked very little at dinner. both of us i think were quite unequal to the occasion. whatever meetings we had imagined, certainly neither of us had thought of this very possible encounter, a long disconcerting hour side by side. i began to remember old happenings with an astonishing vividness; there within six inches of me was the hand i had kissed; her voice was the same to its lightest shade, her hair flowed off her forehead with the same amazingly familiar wave. was she too remembering? but i perhaps had changed altogether....
"why did you go away as you did?" she asked abruptly, when for a moment we were isolated conversationally. "why did you never write?"
she had still that phantom lisp.
"what else could i do?"
she turned away from me and answered the man on her left, who had just addressed her....
when the mid-dinner change came we talked a little about indifferent things, making a stiff conversation like a bridge over a torrent of unspoken intimacies. we discussed something; i think lady tarvrille's flowers and the cape flora and gardens. she told me she had a japanese garden with three japanese gardeners. they were wonderful little men to watch. "humming-bird gardeners," she called them. "they wear their native costume."
"we are your neighbors in surrey," she said, going off abruptly from that. "we are quite near to your father."
she paused with that characteristic effect of deliberation in her closed lips. then she added: "i can see the trees behind your father's house from the window of my room."
"yes," i said. "you take all our southward skyline."
she turned her face to me with the manner of a great lady adding a new acquaintance to her collection. but her eyes met mine very steadily and intimately. "mr. stratton," she said—it was the first time in her life she had called me that—"when we come back to surrey i want you to come and see me and tell me of all the things you are going to do. will you?"
