“Should you mind sitting out with me?” he asked. “I’m quite incapable of dancing.” He piloted Helen to a corner which was supplied with two arm-chairs, and thus enjoyed the advantage of semi-privacy. They sat down, and for a few minutes Helen was too much under the influence of dancing to speak.
“Astonishing!” she exclaimed at last. “What sort of shape can she think her body is?” This remark was called forth by a lady who came past them, waddling rather than walking, and leaning on the arm of a stout man with globular green eyes set in a fat white face. Some support was necessary, for she was very stout, and so compressed that the upper part of her body hung considerably in advance of her feet, which could only trip in tiny steps, owing to the tightness of the skirt round her ankles. The dress itself consisted of a small piece of shiny yellow satin, adorned here and there indiscriminately with round shields of blue and green beads made to imitate hues of a peacock’s breast. On the summit of a frothy castle of hair a purple plume stood erect, while her short neck was encircled by a black velvet ribbon knobbed with gems, and golden bracelets were tightly wedged into the flesh of her fat gloved arms. She had the face of an impertinent but jolly little pig, mottled red under a dusting of powder.
St. John could not join in Helen’s laughter.
“It makes me sick,” he declared. “The whole thing makes me sick…. Consider the minds of those people—their feelings. Don’t you agree?”
“I always make a vow never to go to another party of any description,” Helen replied, “and I always break it.”
She leant back in her chair and looked laughingly at the young man. She could see that he was genuinely cross, if at the same time slightly excited.
“However,” he said, resuming his jaunty tone, “I suppose one must just make up one’s mind to it.”
“To what?”
“There never will be more than five people in the world worth talking to.”
Slowly the flush and sparkle in Helen’s face died away, and she looked as quiet and as observant as usual.
“Five people?” she remarked. “I should say there were more than five.”
“You’ve been very fortunate, then,” said Hirst. “Or perhaps I’ve been very unfortunate.” He became silent.
“Should you say I was a difficult kind of person to get on with?” he asked sharply.
“Most clever people are when they’re young,” Helen replied.
“And of course I am—immensely clever,” said Hirst. “I’m infinitely cleverer than Hewet. It’s quite possible,” he continued in his curiously impersonal manner, “that I’m going to be one of the people who really matter. That’s utterly different from being clever, though one can’t expect one’s family to see it,” he added bitterly.
Helen thought herself justified in asking, “Do you find your family difficult to get on with?”
“Intolerable…. They want me to be a peer and a privy councillor. I’ve come out here partly in order to settle the matter. It’s got to be settled. Either I must go to the bar, or I must stay on in Cambridge. Of course, there are obvious drawbacks to each, but the arguments certainly do seem to me in favour of Cambridge. This kind of thing!” he waved his hand at the crowded ballroom. “Repulsive. I’m conscious of great powers of affection too. I’m not susceptible, of course, in the way Hewet is. I’m very fond of a few people. I think, for example, that there’s something to be said for my mother, though she is in many ways so deplorable…. At Cambridge, of course, I should inevitably become the most important man in the place, but there are other reasons why I dread Cambridge—” he ceased.
“Are you finding me a dreadful bore?” he asked. He changed curiously from a friend confiding in a friend to a conventional young man at a party.
“Not in the least,” said Helen. “I like it very much.”
“You can’t think,” he exclaimed, speaking almost with emotion, “what a difference it makes finding someone to talk to! Directly I saw you I felt you might possibly understand me. I’m very fond of Hewet, but he hasn’t the remotest idea what I’m like. You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who seems to have the faintest conception of what I mean when I say a thing.”
The next dance was beginning; it was the Barcarolle out of Hoffman, which made Helen beat her toe in time to it; but she felt that after such a compliment it was impossible to get up and go, and, besides being amused, she was really flattered, and the honesty of his conceit attracted her. She suspected that he was not happy, and was sufficiently feminine to wish to receive confidences.
“I’m very old,” she sighed.
“The odd thing is that I don’t find you old at all,” he replied. “I feel as though we were exactly the same age. Moreover—” here he hesitated, but took courage from a glance at her face, “I feel as if I could talk quite plainly to you as one does to a man—about the relations between the sexes, about … and…”
In spite of his certainty a slight redness came into his face as he spoke the last two words.
She reassured him at once by the laugh with which she exclaimed, “I should hope so!”
He looked at her with real cordiality, and the lines which were drawn about his nose and lips slackened for the first time.
“Thank God!” he exclaimed. “Now we can behave like civilised human beings.”
Certainly a barrier which usually stands fast had fallen, and it was possible to speak of matters which are generally only alluded to between men and women when doctors are present, or the shadow of death. In five minutes he was telling her the history of his life. It was long, for it was full of extremely elaborate incidents, which led on to a discussion of the principles on which morality is founded, and thus to several very interesting matters, which even in this ballroom had to be discussed in a whisper, lest one of the pouter pigeon ladies or resplendent merchants should overhear them, and proceed to demand that they should leave the place. When they had come to an end, or, to speak more accurately, when Helen intimated by a slight slackening of her attention that they had sat there long enough, Hirst rose, exclaiming, “So there’s no reason whatever for all this mystery!”
“None, except that we are English people,” she answered. She took his arm and they crossed the ballroom, making their way with difficulty between the spinning couples, who were now perceptibly dishevelled, and certainly to a critical eye by no means lovely in their shapes. The excitement of undertaking a friendship and the length of their talk, made them hungry, and they went in search of food to the dining-room, which was now full of people eating at little separate tables. In the doorway they met Rachel, going up to dance again with Arthur Venning. She was flushed and looked very happy, and Helen was struck by the fact that in this mood she was certainly more attractive than the generality of young women. She had never noticed it so clearly before.
“Enjoying yourself?” she asked, as they stopped for a second.
“Miss Vinrace,” Arthur answered for her, “has just made a confession; she’d no idea that dances could be so delightful.”
“Yes!” Rachel exclaimed. “I’ve changed my view of life completely!”
“You don’t say so!” Helen mocked. They passed on.
“That’s typical of Rachel,” she said. “She changes her view of life about every other day. D’you know, I believe you’re just the person I want,” she said, as they sat down, “to help me complete her education? She’s been brought up practically in a nunnery. Her father’s too absurd. I’ve been doing what I can—but I’m too old, and I’m a woman. Why shouldn’t you talk to her—explain things to her—talk to her, I mean, as you talk to me?”