A Rendezvous
i

“I suppose you’ve never thought about me once since I’ve left!”

She was sitting on the sofa in the small, shelved breakfast-room, and she shot these words at Edwin Clayhanger, who was standing near her. The singular words were certainly uttered out of bravado: they were a challenge to adventure. She thought: “It is madness for me to say such a thing.” But such a thing had, nevertheless, come quite glibly out of her mouth, and she knew not why. If Edwin Clayhanger was startled, so was she startled.

“Oh yes, I have!” he stammered—of course, she had put him out of countenance.

She smiled, and said persuasively: “But you’ve never inquired after me.”

“Yes, I have,” he answered, with a hint of defiance, after a pause.

“Only once.” She continued to smile.

“How do you know?” he demanded.

Then she told him very calmly, extinguishing the smile, that her source of information was Janet.

“That’s nothing to go by!” he exclaimed, with sudden roughness. “That’s nothing to go by—the number of times I’ve inquired!”
ii

She was silenced. She thought: “If I am thus intimate with him, it must be because of the talk we had in the garden that night.” And it seemed to her that the scene in the garden had somehow bound them together for ever in intimacy, that, even if they pretended to be only acquaintances, they would constantly be breaking through the thin shell of formality into some unguessed deep of intimacy. She regarded—surreptitiously—his face, with a keen sense of pleasure. It was romantic, melancholy, wistful, enigmatic—and, above all, honest. She knew that he had desired to be an architect, and that his father had thwarted his desire, and this fact endowed him for her with the charm of a victim. The idea that all his life had been embittered and shadowed by the caprice of an old man was beautiful to her in its sadness: she contemplated it with vague bliss. At their last meeting, during the Sunday School Centenary, he had annoyed her; he had even drawn her disdain, by his lack of initiative and male force in the incident of the senile Sunday School teacher. He had profoundly disappointed her. Now, she simply forgot this; the sinister impression vanished from her mind. She recalled her first vision of him in the lighted doorway of his father’s shop. Her present vision confirmed that sympathetic vision. She liked the feel of his faithful hand, and the glance of his timid and yet bellicose eye. And she reposed on his very apparent honesty as on a bed. She knew, with the assurance of perfect faith, that he had nothing dubious to conceal, and that no test could strain his magnanimity. And, while she so reflected, she was thinking, too, of Janet’s fine dress, and her elegance and jewels, and wishing that she had changed the old black frock in which she travelled. The perception that she could never be like Janet cast her down. But, the next moment, she was saying to herself proudly: “What does it matter? Why should I be like Janet?” And, the next moment after that, she was saying, in another phase of her pride: “I will be like Janet!”

They began to discuss the strike. It was a topic which, during those weeks, could not be avoided, either by the rich or by the poor.

“I suppose you’re like all the rest—against the men?” she challenged him again, inviting battle.

He replied bluntly: “What earthly right have you to suppose that I’m like all the rest?”

She bent her head lower, so that she could only see him through the veil of her eyelashes.

“I’m very sorry,” she said, in a low, smiling, meditative voice. “I knew all the time you weren’t.”

The thought shot through her mind like a lance: “It is incredible, and horribly dangerous, that I should be sitting here with him, after all that has happened to me, and him without the slightest suspicion!... And yet what can stop it from coming out, sooner or later? Nothing can stop it.”

Edwin Clayhanger continued to talk of the strike, and she heard him saying: “If you ask me, I’ll tell you what I think—workmen on strike are always in the right... you’............