The Pretty Lady | Page 4

do you think the war will last?"
The man answered with serenity: "The war has not begun yet."
"How English you are! But all the same, I ask myself whether you
would say that if you had seen Belgium. I came here from Ostend last
month." The man gazed at her with new vivacious interest.
"So it is like that that you are here!"
"But do not let us talk about it," she added quickly with a mournful
smile.
"No, no!" he agreed.... "I see you have a piano. I expect you are fond of
music."
"Ah!" she exclaimed in a fresh, relieved tone. "Am I fond of it! I adore
it, quite simply. Do play for me. Play a boston--a two-step."
"I can't," he said.
"But you play. I am sure of it."
"And you?" he parried.

She made a sad negative sign.
"Well, I'll play something out of The Rosenkavalier."
"Ah! But you are a musician!" She amiably scrutinised him. "And
yet--no."
Smiling, he, too, made a sad negative sign.
"The waltz out of The Rosenkavalier, eh?"
"Oh, yes! A waltz. I prefer waltzes to anything."
As soon as he had played a few bars she passed demurely out of the
sitting-room, through the main part of the bedroom into the cabinet de
toilette. She moved about in the cabinet de toilette thinking that the
waltz out of The Rosenkavalier was divinely exciting. The delicate
sound of her movements and the plash of water came to him across the
bedroom. As he played he threw a glance at her now and then; he could
see well enough, but not very well because the smoke of the shortening
cigarette was in his eyes.
She returned at length into the sitting-room, carrying a small silk bag
about five inches by three. The waltz finished.
"But you'll take cold!" he murmured.
"No. At home I never take cold. Besides--"
Smiling at him as he swung round on the music-stool, she undid the
bag, and drew from it some folded stuff which she slowly shook out,
rather in the manner of a conjurer, until it was revealed as a full-sized
kimono. She laughed.
"Is it not marvellous?"
"It is."
"That is what I wear. In the way of chiffons it is the only fantasy I have

bought up to the present in London. Of course, clothes--I have been
forced to buy clothes. It matches exquisitely the stockings, eh?"
She slid her arms into the sleeves of the transparency. She was a pretty
and highly developed girl of twenty-six, short, still lissom, but with the
fear of corpulence in her heart. She had beautiful hair and beautiful
eyes, and she had that pucker of the forehead denoting, according to
circumstances, either some kindly, grave preoccupation or a benevolent
perplexity about something or other.
She went near him and clasped hands round his neck, and whispered:
"Your waltz was adorable. You are an artist."
And with her shoulders she seemed to sketch the movements of
dancing.
Chapter 4
CONFIDENCE
After putting on his thick overcoat and one glove he had suddenly
darted to the dressing-table for his watch, which he was forgetting.
Christine's face showed sympathetic satisfaction that he had
remembered in time, simultaneously implying that even if he had not
remembered, the watch would have been perfectly safe till he called for
it. The hour was five minutes to midnight. He was just going. Christine
had dropped a little batch of black and red Treasury notes on to the
dressing-table with an indifferent if not perhaps an impatient air, as
though she held these financial sequels to be a stain on the ideal, a
tedious necessary, a nuisance, or simply negligible.
She kissed him goodbye, and felt agreeably fragile and soft within the
embrace of his huge, rough overcoat. And she breathed winningly,
delicately, apologetically into his ear:
"Thou wilt give something to the servant?" Her soft eyes seemed to say,
"It is not for myself that I am asking, is it?"

He made an easy philanthropic gesture to indicate that the servant
would have no reason to regret his passage.
He opened the door into the little hall, where the fat Italian maid was
yawning in an atmosphere comparatively cold, and then, in a change of
purpose, he shut the door again.
"You do not know how I knew you could not have been in London very
long," he said confidentially.
"No."
"Because I saw you in Paris one night in July--at the Marigny Theatre."
"Not at the Marigny."
"Yes. The Marigny."
"It is true. I recall it. I wore white and a yellow stole."
"Yes. You stood on the seat at the back of the Promenade to see a
contortionist girl better, and then you jumped down. I thought you were
delicious--quite delicious."
"Thou