I was extremely sorry for Cynthia Drassilis. Meeting her mother frequently, I could hardly fail to be. Mrs Drassilis was a representative of a type I disliked. She was a widow, who had been left with what she considered insufficient means, and her outlook on life was a compound of greed and querulousness. Sloane Square and South Kensington are full of women in her situation. Their position resembles that of the Ancient Mariner. ‘Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.’ For ‘water’ in their case substitute ‘money’. Mrs Drassilis was connected with money on all sides, but could only obtain it in rare and minute quantities. Any one of a dozen relations-in-law could, if they had wished, have trebled her annual income without feeling it. But they did not so wish. They disapproved of Mrs Drassilis. In their opinion the Hon. Hugo Drassilis had married beneath him–not so far beneath him as to make the thing a horror to be avoided in conversation and thought, but far enough to render them coldly polite to his wife during his lifetime and almost icy to his widow after his death. Hugo’s eldest brother, the Earl of Westbourne, had never liked the obviously beautiful, but equally obviously second-rate, daughter of a provincial solicitor whom Hugo had suddenly presented to the family one memorable summer as his bride. He considered that, by doubling the income derived from Hugo’s life-insurance and inviting Cynthia to the family seat once a year during her childhood, he had done all that could be expected of him in the matter.
He had not. Mrs Drassilis expected a great deal more of him, the non-receipt of which had spoiled her temper, her looks, and the peace of mind of all who had anything much to do with her.
It used to irritate me when I overheard people, as I occasionally have done, speak of Cynthia as hard. I never found her so myself, though heaven knows she had enough to make her so, to me she was always a sympathetic, charming friend.
Ours was a friendship almost untouched by sex. Our minds fitted so smoothly into one another that I had no inclination to fall in love. I knew her too well. I had no discoveries to make about her. Her honest, simple soul had always been open to me to read. There was none of that curiosity, that sense of something beyond that makes for love. We had reached a point of comradeship beyond which neither of us desired to pass.
Yet at the Fletchers’ ball I asked Cynthia to marry me, and she consented.
. . . . .
Looking back, I can see that, though the determining cause was Mr Tankerville Gifford, it was Audrey who was responsible. She had made me human, capable of sympathy, and it was sympathy, primarily, that led me to say what I said that night.
But the immediate cause was certainly young Mr Gifford.
I arrived at Marlow Square, where I was to pick up Cynthia and her mother, a little late, and found Mrs Drassilis, florid and overdressed, in the drawing-room with a sleek-haired, pale young man known to me as Tankerville Gifford–to his intimates, of whom I was not one, and in the personal paragraphs of the coloured sporting weeklies, as ‘Tanky’. I had seen him frequently at restaurants. Once, at the Empire, somebody had introduced me to him; but, as he had not been sober at the moment, he had missed any intellectual pleasure my acquaintanceship might have afforded him. Like everybody else who moves about in London, I knew all bout him. To sum him up, he was a most unspeakable little cad, and, if the drawing-room had not been Mrs Drassilis’s, I should have wondered at finding him in it.
Mrs Drassilis introduced us.
‘I think we have already met,’ I said.
He stared glassily.
‘Don’t remember.’
I was not surprised.
At this moment Cynthia came in. Out of the corner of my eye I observed a look of fuddled displeasure come into Tanky’s face at her frank pleasure at seeing me.
I had never seen her looking better. She is a tall girl, who carries herself magnificently. The simplicity of her dress gained an added dignity from comparison with the rank glitter of her mother’s. She wore unrelieved black, a colour which set off to wonderful advantage the clear white of her skin and her pale-gold hair.