The Path of a Star | Page 5

get on perfectly with the cart. Good-bye! Calcutta is waiting for you."
"Calcutta is never impatient," said Miss Howe. "It is waiting with yawns and much whisky and soda." She gave him a stately inclination with her hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his heart in a burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something, and turned. He stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had stood, but the sun was gone. "You might tell me more about your friend of the altruistic army," he said.
"You saw, you heard, you know."
"But--"
"Oh," cried she, disregardingly, "you can discover her for yourself, at the Army Headquarters in Bentinck Street--you man!"
Lindsay closed the door behind him without replying, and half-way down the stairs her voice appealed to him over the banisters.
"You might as well forget that. I didn't particularly mean it."
"I know you didn't," he returned. "You woman! But you yourself-- you're not going to play with your heavenly visitant?"
Hilda leaned upon the banisters, her arms dropping over from the elbows. "I suppose I may look at her," she said; and her smile glowed down upon him.
"Do you think it really rewards attention?--the type, I mean."
"How you will talk of types! Didn't you see that she was unique? You may come back if you like, for a quarter of an hour, and we will discuss her."
Lindsay looked at his watch. "I would come back for a quarter of an hour to discuss anything, or nothing," he replied, "but there isn't time. I am dining with the Archdeacon. I must go to church."
"Why not be original and dine with the Archdeacon without going to church? Why not say on arrival: 'My dear Archdeacon, your sermon and your mutton the same evening--c'est trop! I cannot so impose upon your generosity. I have come for the mutton!'"
Thus was Captain Laura Filbert superseded, as doubtless often before, by an orthodox consideration. Duff Lindsay drove away in his cart; and still, for an appreciable number of seconds, Miss Howe stood leaning over the banisters, her eyes fixed full of speculation on the place where he had stood. She was thinking of a scene--a dinner with an Archdeacon--and of the permanent satisfactions to be got from it; and she renounced almost with a palpable sigh the idea of the Archdeacon's asking her.
CHAPTER II
"Oh, her gift!" said Alicia Livingstone. "It is the lowest, isn't it--in the scale of human endowment? Mimicry."
Miss Livingstone handed her brother his tea as she spoke, but turned her eyes and her delicate chin up to Duff Lindsay with the protest. Lindsay's cup was at his lips, and his eyebrows went up over it as if they would answer before his voice was set at liberty.
"Mimicry isn't a fair word," he said. "The mimic doesn't interpret. He's a mere thief of expression. You can always see him behind his stolen mask. The actress takes a different rank. This one does, anyway."
"You're mixing her up with the apes and the monkeys," remarked Surgeon-Major Livingstone.
"Mere imitators!" cried Mrs. Barberry.
Alicia did not allow the argument to pursue her. She smiled upon their energy and, so to speak, disappeared. It was one of her little ways, and since it left seeming conquerors on her track nobody quarrelled with it.
"I've met them in London," she said. "Oh, I remember one hot little North Kensington flat full of them, and their cigarettes-- and they were always disappointing. There seemed to be somehow no basis--nothing to go upon."
She looked from one to the other of her party with a graceful deprecating movement of her head, a head which people were unanimous in calling more than merely pretty and more than ordinarily refined. That was the cursory verdict, the superficial thing to see and say; it will do to go on with. From the way Lindsay looked at her as she spoke, he might have been suspected of other discoveries, possible only to the somewhat privileged in this blind world, where intimacy must lend a lens to find out anything at all.
"You found that they had no selves," he said, and the manner of his words was encouraging and provocative. His proposition was obscured to him for the instant by his desire to obtain the very last of her comment, and it might be seen that this was habitual with him. "But Miss Hilda Howe has one."
"Is she a lady?" asked Mrs. Barberry.
"I don't know. She's an individual. I prefer to rest my claim for her on that."
"Your claim to what?" trembled upon Miss Livingstone's lips, but she closed them instead, and turned her head again to listen to Mrs. Barberry. The turns of Alicia's head had a way of punctuating the conversations in which she was interested, imparting elegance and relief.
"I saw her in A Woman of Honour,