IV

He was idly regarding himself in an immense mirror that topped the fireplace, and thinking that despite the stylishness of his accoutrement he presented the appearance of a rather tousled and hairy person of unromantic middle-age, when, in the glass, he saw the gilded door open and a woman enter the room.  He did not move,—­only stared at the image.  He knew the woman intimately, profoundly, exhaustively, almost totally.  He knew her as one knows the countryside in which one has grown up, where every feature of the scene has become a habit of the perceptions.  And yet he had also a strange sensation of seeing her newly, of seeing her for the first time in his life and estimating her afresh.  In a flash he had compared her, in this boudoir, with Lady Massulam in Lady Massulam’s bungalow.  In a flash all the queer, frightening romance of 2 a.m. in Frinton had swept through his mind.  Well, she had not the imposingness nor the mystery of Lady Massulam, nor perhaps the challenge of Lady Massulam; she was very much more prosaic to him.  But still he admitted that she had an effect on him, that he reacted to her presence, that she was at any rate at least as incalculable as Lady Massulam, and that there might be bits of poetry gleaming in her prose, and that after a quarter of a century he had not arrived at a final judgment about her.  Withal Lady Massulam had a quality which she lacked,—­he did not know what the quality was, but he knew that it excited him in an unprecedented manner and that he wanted it and would renounce it with regret.  “Is it conceivable,” he thought, shocked at himself, “that all three of us are on the road to fifty years?”

Then he turned, and blushed, feeling exactly like an undergraduate.

“I knew you’d be bored up there in that hole.”  Eve greeted him.

“I wasn’t bored for a single moment,” said he.

“Don’t tell me,” said she.

She was very smart in her plumpness.  The brim of her spreading hat bumped against his forehead as he bent to kiss her.  The edge of the brown veil came half-way down her face, leaving her mouth unprotected from him, but obscuring her disturbing eyes.  As he kissed her all his despondency and worry fell away from him, and he saw with extraordinary clearness that since the previous evening he had been an irrational ass.  The creature had done nothing unusual, nothing that he had not explicitly left her free to do; and everything was all right.

“Did you see your friend Lady Massulam?” was her first question.

Marvellous the intuition—­or the happy flukes—­of women!  Yet their duplicity was still more marvellous.  The creature’s expressed anxiety about the danger of Lady Massulam’s society to Charlie must have been pure, wanton, gratuitous pretence.

He told her of his meeting with Lady Massulam.

“I left her at 2 a.m.,” said he, with well-feigned levity.