“You were young, you were beautiful, you still have beauty, you are not, cannot be, old.  Cling to youth, cling to beauty; take all you can get, before your face gets lines and your hair grey; it is impossible that you have been loved for the last time.”

To see Jimmy Fort at the concert, talking to Noel, had brought this emotion to a head.  She was not of a grudging nature, and could genuinely admire Noel, but the idea that Jimmy Fort might also admire disturbed her greatly.  He must not; it was not fair; he was too old—­besides, the girl had her boy; and she had taken care that he should know it.  So, leaning towards him, while a bare-shouldered young lady sang, she had whispered: 

“Penny?”

And he had whispered back: 

“Tell you afterwards.”

That had comforted her.  She would make him take her home.  It was time she showed her heart.

And now, in the cab, resolved to make her feelings known, in sudden shyness she found it very difficult.  Love, to which for quite three years she had been a stranger, was come to life within her.  The knowledge was at once so sweet, and so disturbing, that she sat with face averted, unable to turn the precious minutes to account.  They arrived at the flat without having done more than agree that the streets were dark, and the moon bright.  She got out with a sense of bewilderment, and said rather desperately: 

“You must come up and have a cigarette.  It’s quite early, still.”

He went up.

“Wait just a minute,” said Leila.

Sitting there with his drink and his cigarette, he stared at some sunflowers in a bowl—­Famille Rose—­and waited just ten; smiling a little, recalling the nose of the fairy princess, and the dainty way her lips shaped the words she spoke.  If she had not had that lucky young devil of a soldier boy, one would have wanted to buckle her shoes, lay one’s coat in the mud for her, or whatever they did in fairytales.  One would have wanted—­ah! what would one not have wanted!  Hang that soldier boy!  Leila said he was twenty-two.  By George! how old it made a man feel who was rising forty, and tender on the off-fore!  No fairy princesses for him!  Then a whiff of perfume came to his nostrils; and, looking up, he saw Leila standing before him, in a long garment of dark silk, whence her white arms peeped out.

“Another penny?  Do you remember these things, Jimmy?  The Malay women used to wear them in Cape Town.  You can’t think what a relief it is to get out of my slave’s dress.  Oh!  I’m so sick of nursing!  Jimmy, I want to live again a little!”

The garment had taken fifteen years off her age, and a gardenia, just where the silk crossed on her breast, seemed no whiter than her skin.  He wondered whimsically whether it had dropped to her out of the dark!

“Live?” he said.  “Why!  Don’t you always?”

She raised her hands so that the dark silk fell, back from the whole length of those white arms.