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A woman in a velvet gown warming her dainty little feet on a gilded fender, in a boudoir all aglow with colour and lamplight; a cavalier in satin raiment buckling his sword-belt before a Venetian mirror; a pair of lovers kissing in a sunlit corridor; a girl in a hansom cab; a milliner's shop; and so on, and so on. Then came the classical subjects of the last new school.
My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office. I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor's hansom, to her vivid summing-up of the case.
She may have studied the more closely her lodger's habits, noting his constant care of his person, the way in which he used his knife and fork, the softness and cleanliness of his hands all object-lessons to her, for she broke out on her husband the day after her talk with the Englishman in the hansom cab with: "I want to tell ye that ye'll have to stop spatterin' yer soup around after this, John, dear.
"Walked past him as though I had never set eyes on him in my life, and didn't then; took a hansom in the King's Road, and drove like the deuce to Clapham Junction; rushed on to the nearest platform, without a ticket, jumped into the first train I saw, got out at Twickenham, walked full tilt back to Richmond, took the District to Charing Cross, and here I am!
He was very civil and sympathetic, this young medico, but he was also rather too obviously impressed by his own importance and this gruesome occasion. Brigit gave him the address of her flat, and helping her mother into a four-wheeler, as more suitable than a hansom, the two women drove away towards Kensington.
For a moment Trefusis felt a vagabond impulse to resume the language of Smilash and fable to the man of hampers of turkey and plum-pudding in the van. But he repressed it, got into a hansom, and was driven to his father-in-law's house in Belsize Avenue, studying in a gloomily critical mood the anxiety that surged upon him and made his heart beat like a boy's as he drew near his destination.
It was time for them to go now; but, as they drove home in a hansom, Malcolm suddenly laid his hand on Anna's. "You are very quiet, dear," he said gently. "Have I tired you, or has your day disappointed you?" But he was amazed when the girl turned her face to him, for he saw her eyes were full of unshed tears. "Oh no, it has been perfect you and your friends have been so good to me, Malcolm.
"To many summers," I replied, "for we are going away back, David, to see your mother as she was in the days before there was you." We hailed a hansom. "Drive back six years," I said to the cabby, "and stop at the Junior Old Fogies' Club." He was a stupid fellow, and I had to guide him with my umbrella. The streets were not quite as they had been in the morning.
He bought later editions of the afternoon papers that he might rehearse the episode from his new point of view, and was disappointed to find that where some fresh sensation had not crowded him from print altogether, he was dismissed to out-of-the way corners which nobody read. Yet this, too, he met with a statesman's broad philosophy. "Lady in hansom wants to speak with you, sir."
On the way home in the carriage, for the first time in my life, I was inclined to indulge in the radical thought that money was NOT properly divided. On arriving home at a quarter-past eleven, we found a hansom cab, which had been waiting for me for two hours with a letter. Sarah said she did not know what to do, as we had not left the address where we had gone.
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