December Love Part 7

"Oh, yes, long ago. I only go to Aix now for a cure, and sometimes in the early spring to Cap Martin."

"The hotel?"

"Yes; the hotel. I like the pine woods."

"So do I. But, to my mind, there's no longer a vestige of real romance on the French Riviera. Too many grand dukes have pa.s.sed over it."

Lady Sellingworth laughed.

"But I don't seek romance when I leave London."

"No?"

She looked oddly doubtful for a moment. Then she said:

"Mr. Craven, will you tell us the truth?"

"It depends. What about?"

"Oh, a very simple matter."

"I'll do my best, but all men are liars."

"We only ask you to do your best."

"We!" he said, with a glance at Lady Sellingworth.

"Yes--yes," she said. "I go solid with my s.e.x."

"Then--what is it?"

"Do you ever go travelling--ever, without a secret hope of romance meeting you on your travels, somewhere, somehow, wonderfully, suddenly?

Do you?"

He thought for a moment. Then he said:

"Honestly, I don't think I ever do."

"There!" said Miss Van Tuyn triumphantly. "Nor do I."

She looked half defiantly, half inquisitively at Lady Sellingworth.

"My dear Beryl!" said the latter, "for all these lacks in your temperament you must wait."

"Wait? For how long?"

"Till you are fifty, perhaps."

"I know I shall want romance at fifty."

"Let us say sixty, then."

"Or," interrupted Craven, "until you are comfortably married."

"Comfortably married!" she cried. "_Quelle horreur!_"

"I had no idea Americans were so romantic," said Lady Sellingworth, with just a touch of featherweight malice.

"Americans! I believe the longing for romance covers both s.e.xes and all the human race."

She let her eyes go into Craven's.

"Only up till a certain age," said Lady Sellingworth. "When we love to sit by the fire, we can do very well without it. But we must be careful to lay up treasure for our old age, mental treasure. We must cultivate tastes and habits which have nothing to do with wildness. A man in Sorrento taught me about that."

"A man in Sorrento!" said Miss Van Tuyn, suddenly and sharply on the alert.

"Yes. He was a famous writer, and had, I dare say, been a famous lover in his time. One day, as we drove beyond the town towards the hills, he described to me the compensations old age holds for sensible people.

It's a question of cultivating and preparing the mind, of filling the storehouse against the day of famine. He had done it, and a.s.sured me that he didn't regret his lost youth or sigh after its unrecoverable pleasures. He had accustomed his mind to its task."

"What task, dearest?"

"Acting in connexion with the soul--his word that--as a thoroughly efficient subst.i.tute for his body as a pleasure giver."

At this moment the adoring eyes of the three musicians who were "hairdressers in the daytime" focussed pa.s.sionately upon Miss Van Tuyn, distracted her attention. She felt masculinity intent upon her and responded automatically.

"The dear boys! They are asking if they shall play the Pastorale for me.

Look at their eyes!" she said.

Craven did not bother to do that, but looked instead at hers, wondering a little at her widespread energy in net casting. Was it possible that once Lady Sellingworth had been like that, ceaselessly on the lookout for worship, requiring it as a right, even from men who were hairdressers in the daytime? As the musicians began to play he met her eyes again and felt sure that it could not have been so. Whatever she had done, whatever she had been, she could never have frequented the back stairs. That thought seemed a rather cruel thrust at Miss Van Tuyn.

But there is a difference in vanities. Wonderful variety of nature!

When the players had finished the Pastorale and "A Mezzanotte," and had been rewarded by a long look of thanks from Miss Van Tuyn which evidently drove them over the borders of admiration into the regions of unfulfilled desire, Lady Sellingworth said she must go. And then an unexpected thing happened. It appeared that Miss Van Tuyn had asked a certain famous critic, who though English by birth was more Parisian than most French people, to call for her at the restaurant and take her on to join a party at the Cafe Royal. She, therefore, could not go yet, and she begged Lady Sellingworth to stay on and to finish up the evening in the company of Georgians at little marble tables. But Lady Sellingworth laughingly jibbed at the Cafe Royal.

"I should fall out of my _a.s.siette_ there!" she said.

"But no one is ever surprised at the Cafe Royal, dearest. It is the one place in London where--Ah! here is Jennings come to fetch us!"

A very small man, with a pointed black beard and wandering green eyes, wearing a Spanish sombrero and a black cloak, and carrying an ebony stick nearly as tall as himself, at this moment slipped furtively into the room, and, without changing his delicately plaintive expression, came up to Miss Van Tuyn and ceremoniously shook hands with her.

Lady Sellingworth looked for a moment at Craven.

"May I escort you home?" he said. "At any rate, let me get you a taxi."

"Lady Sellingworth, may I introduce Ambrose Jennings," said Miss Van Tuyn in a rather firm voice at this moment.

Lady Sellingworth bent kindly to the little man far down below her.

After a word or two she said: