The Making of a Prig Part 14

And Katharine, who had no desire for a larger appet.i.te than she already possessed, ate the _hors d'oeuvre_ with a relish, and longed for more, and wondered if she should ever attain to the extreme culture of her companion, who was playing delicately with the sardine on his plate.

"Don't you ever feel hungry?" she asked him. "It seems to add to your isolation that you have none of the ordinary frailties of the flesh. I really believe it would quite destroy my illusion of you, if I ever caught you enjoying a penny bun!"

"You may preserve the illusion, if you like, and remember that I am not a woman. It is only women who-- Well, what is it now, child?"

"Do explain this," she begged him, with a comical expression of dismay. "Why is it red?"

"I should say because, fundamentally, it is red mullet. It would never occur to me to inquire more deeply into it; but the rest is probably accounted for by the carte, if you understand French. Don't you think you had better approach it, fasting and with faith?"

"Go on about your appet.i.te, please; it is so awfully entertaining,"

resumed Katharine. "I believe, if you found yourself really hungry one day, force of habit would still make you eat your lunch as though you didn't want it a bit. Now, wouldn't it?"

"My dear Miss Katharine, you have yet to learn that hunger does not give you a desire for more food, but merely imparts an element of pleasure to it. Go on with your fish, or else the entree will catch you up."

"I am glad," said Katharine, in the interval between the courses, "that I'm not a superior person like you. It must be so lonely, isn't it?"

"What wine will you drink? White or red?" asked Paul severely.

"Living with you," continued Katharine, leaning back and looking mischievously at what was visible of him over the wine list, "must be exactly like living with Providence."

"Number five," said Paul to the waiter, laying down the wine list.

Then he looked at her, and shook his head reprovingly.

"You see you don't live with me, do you?" he said drily.

"No," retorted Katharine hastily. "I live with sixty-three working gentlewomen, and that is a very different matter."

"Very," he a.s.sented, looking so searchingly at her that she found herself beginning to blush. The arrival of the wine made a diversion.

"Oh," said Katharine, "I am quite sure I can't drink any champagne."

"If you had not been so occupied in firing off epigrams, you might have had some choice in the matter. As it is, you have got to do as you are told."

He filled her gla.s.s, and she felt that it was very pleasant to do as she was told by him; and her eyes glistened as they met his over the br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.ses.

"I am so happy to-day," she felt obliged to tell him.

"That's right. Because it is the first day of the holidays?"

"Because you are so nice to me, I think," she replied softly; and then was afraid lest she had said too much. But he nodded, and seemed to understand; and she dropped her eyes suddenly and began crumbling her bread.

"What makes you so nice to me, I wonder," she continued in the same tone. This time he became matter-of-fact.

"The natural order of the universe, I suppose. Man was created to look after woman, and woman to look after man; don't you think so?"

She understood him well enough, by now, to know when to take her tone from him.

"At all events, it saves Providence a lot of trouble," she said; and they laughed together.

Their lunch was a success; and Paul smiled at her woe-begone face when the black coffee had been brought, and she was beginning slowly to remember that there was still such a place as number ten, Queen's Crescent, and that it actually existed in the same metropolis as the one that contained this superb restaurant.

"It is nearly over, and it has been so beautiful," she sighed.

"Nonsense! it has only just begun. It isn't time to be dull yet; I'll tell you when it is," said Paul briskly; and he called for a daily paper.

"What do you mean?" gasped Katharine, opening her eyes wide in antic.i.p.ation of new joys to come.

"We're going to a matinee, of course. Let's see,--have you any choice?"

"A theatre? Oh!" cried Katharine. Then she reddened a little. "You won't laugh if I tell you something?"

"Tell away, you most childish of children!"

"I've never been to a theatre before, either."

They looked at the paper together, and laughed one another's suggestions to scorn, and then found they had only just time to get to the theatre before it began. And she sat through the three acts with her hand lying in his; and to her it was a perfect ending to the most perfect day in her life. He took her home afterwards, and left her at the corner of the street.

"I won't come to the door; better not, perhaps," he said, and his words sent a sudden feeling of chill through her. They seemed to have fallen back into the conventional att.i.tude again, the most appropriate one, probably, for Edgware Road, but none the less depressing on that account.

"You are not going to be sad, now?" he added, half guessing her thoughts. She looked up in his face and made an effort to be bright.

"It has been beautiful all the time," she said. "I never knew anything could be so beautiful before."

"Ah," he said, smiling back; "it is the first day of your first holidays, you see. We will do it again some day." But she knew as he spoke that they never could do it again.

She saw him occasionally during the Easter holidays. He sent for her once about a pupil he had managed to procure her, and once about some drawing-room lectures he tried to arrange for her, and which fell through. But on both these occasions he was in his silent mood, and she came away infected by his dulness. Then she met him one day in the neighbourhood of Queen's Crescent, and they had a few minutes conversation in the noise and bustle of the street, that left her far happier than she had been after a tete-a-tete in his chambers.

She went home for a few days at the end of her holidays, but her visit was not altogether a success. It was a shock to her to find that home was no longer the same now that she had once left it; and she did not quite realise that the change was in herself as much as in those she had left behind her. Her father had grown accustomed to living without her, and it hurt her pride to find that she was no longer indispensable to him. Her old occupations seemed gone, and there was no time to subst.i.tute new ones; she told herself bitterly that she had no place in her own home, and that she had burnt her ships when she went out to make herself a new place in the world. Ivingdon seemed narrower in its sympathies and duller than ever; she wondered how people could go on living with so few ideas in their minds, and so few topics of conversation; even the Rector irritated her by his want of interest in her experiences and by his utter absorption in his own concerns. Miss Esther added to her feeling of strangeness by treating her with elaborate consideration; she would have given anything to be scolded instead, for being profane, or for lying on the hearthrug. But they persisted in regarding her as a child no longer; and she felt graver and more responsible at home, than she had done all the time she was working for her living in London.

On the whole, she was glad when school began again; and she grew much happier when she found herself once more engrossed in the term's work, which had now increased very materially, owing to her own efforts as well as to those of Paul. Of him, she only had occasional glimpses during the next few weeks; but they were enough to keep their friendship warm, and she soon found herself scribbling little notes to him, when she had anything to tell,--generally about some small success of hers which she felt obliged to confide to some one, and liked best of all to confide to him. Sometimes he did not answer them; and she sighed, and took the hint to write no more for a time. And sometimes he wrote back one of his ceremonious replies, which she had learnt to welcome as the most characteristic thing he could have sent her; for, in his letters, Paul never lost his formality. It was a very satisfactory friendship on both sides, with enough familiarity to give it warmth, and not enough to make it disquieting. But it received an unexpected check towards the middle of June, through an incident that was slight enough in itself, though sufficient to set both of them thinking. And to stop and think in the course of a friendship, especially when it is between a man and a woman, is generally the forerunner of a misunderstanding.

It was the first hot weather that year. May had been disappointingly cold and wet, after the promise of the month before, but June came in with a burst of sunshine that lasted long enough to justify the papers in talking about the drought. On one of the first fine days, Paul was lazily smoking in his arm-chair after a late breakfast, when a knock at his outer door roused him unpleasantly from a reverie that had threatened to become a nap; and he rose slowly to his feet with something like a muttered imprecation. Then he remembered that he had left the door open for the sake of the draught, and he shouted a brief "Come in," and sank back again into his chair. A light step crossed the threshold, and paused close behind him.

"Who's there?" asked Paul, without moving.

"Well, you _are_ cross. And on a morning like this, too!"

Paul got up again, with rather more than his usual show of energy, and turned and stared at his visitor.

"Really, Katharine," he said, with a slowly dawning smile of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Oh, I know all that," exclaimed Katharine, with an impatient gesture.

"But the sun was shining, and I had to come, and you'll have to put up with it."

Paul looked as though he should have no difficulty in putting up with it; and he went outside, and sported his oak.

"Won't you sit down, and tell me why you have come?" he suggested, when he came back again. Katharine dropped into a chair, and laughed.

"How can you ask? Why, it is my half-term holiday; and the sun's shining. Look!"