"I was sure of it! No matter--it's all right!" she added.She herself was pacified--trouble was a false note.Later he was on the point of asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were not in the house; but he let it pass.The subject was a profitless riddle--a puzzle that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness, as one opened one's eyes to it.He closed his eyes--he wanted another vision.Besides, she had shown him that she had extraordinary senses--her explanation would have been stranger than the fact.Moreover they had other things to talk about, in particular the question of her putting off her return to Dover till the morrow and dispensing meanwhile with the valuable protection of Sidney.This was indeed but another face of the question of her dining with him somewhere that evening (where else should she dine?)--accompanying him, for instance, just for an hour of Bohemia, in their deadly respectable lives, to a jolly little place in Soho.
Mrs.Ryves declined to have her life abused, but in fact, at the proper moment, at the jolly little place, to which she did accompany him--it dealt in macaroni and Chianti--the pair put their elbows on the crumpled cloth and, face to face, with their little emptied coffee-cups pushed away and the young man's cigarette lighted by her command, became increasingly confidential.They went afterwards to the theatre, in cheap places, and came home in "busses" and under umbrellas.
On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mind as he had never turned anything before; it was the question of whether, at the end, she would let him come into her sitting-room for five minutes.He felt on this point a passion of suspense and impatience, and yet for what would it be but to tell her how poor he was? This was literally the moment to say it, so supremely depleted had the hour of Bohemia left him.Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in the course of the day his whole temper on the subject of certain fitnesses had changed.At Jersey Villas (it was near midnight, and Mrs.Ryves, scratching a light for her glimmering taper, had said:
"Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you like!"), in her precarious parlour, which was indeed, after the brilliances of the evening, a return to ugliness and truth, she let him stand while he explained that he had certainly everything in the way of fame and fortune still to gain, but that youth and love and faith and energy--to say nothing of her supreme dearness--were all on his side.Why, if one's beginnings were rough, should one add to the hardness of the conditions by giving up the dream which, if she would only hear him out, would make just the blessed difference? Whether Mrs.Ryves heard him out or not is a circumstance as to which this chronicle happens to be silent; but after he had got possession of both her hands and breathed into her face for a moment all the intensity of his tenderness--in the relief and joy of utterance he felt it carry him like a rising flood--she checked him with better reasons, with a cold, sweet afterthought in which he felt there was something deep.
Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier than ever, yet it had never meant so many fears and pains--impossibilities and memories, independences and pieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache for the ruin of a friendship that had been happy.She had liked him--if she hadn't she wouldn't have let him think so!--but she protested that she had not, in the odious vulgar sense, "encouraged" him.Moreover she couldn't talk of such things in that place, at that hour, and she begged him not to make her regret her good-nature in staying over.
There were peculiarities in her position, considerations insurmountable.She got rid of him with kind and confused words, and afterwards, in the dull, humiliated night, he felt that he had been put in his place.Women in her situation, women who after having really loved and lost, usually lived on into the new dawns in which old ghosts steal away.But there was something in his whimsical neighbour that struck him as terribly invulnerable.