LATE AND SOON. E. M. Delafield
instead of putting on an act for your benefit."
"I don't want you to put on an act for my benefit, and you know it. The best thing about you is that you're honest, as I've told you before."
"Then what's the matter? What did you come here for, if you don't want to spend the time with me when we've got the chance?"
"I don't see how I'm to make love to you, under your mother's own roof, when I'm here as her guest."
He felt ashamed of himself as he put forward his excuse, factually so well grounded and in reality so false.
"My God, Rory, you didn't say that in London. Things haven't changed, since then."
But they had—only he couldn't tell her so.
"Primrose," he said slowly, "obviously you think I'm the world's cad, and I'm fairly sure you're right."
He stopped, for once uncertain how to continue. She looked at him scornfully.
"I see. You've found somebody else. It would have been more decent to say so before you brought me down here on a fool's errand. However, you needn't worry, I can take it."
He noticed, with a horrid compunction, that two dark shadows had suddenly sprung into life beneath her angry, contemptuous eyes and that behind the contempt there was real pain.
"Oh, God—Primrose!"
Unable to bear it, he pulled her into his arms.
She pressed against him, her anger disappeared.
"Darling, don't be such a fool. Why, in God's name, will you always mix up love with all this sentimental, romantic bloody nonsense of yours?"
He could have answered that—had, indeed, answered it before—but it would be of no use.
Instead, he made the only answer she wanted or would understand and kissed her hard and passionately, giving her love as she knew and desired it and himself moved by the instantaneousness of her response.
"I don't give a damn, really, if you have got another girl," she muttered. "This is all that matters."
Lonergan held her close and kissed her again, hating and despising himself.
"Was that why you wouldn't come into the breakfast-room this evening?"
"What?"
"Because you've started a thing with somebody else?"
"I haven't."
She drew back, honestly bewildered.
"Then what the hell——"
"What I said. I don't see how I can make love to you here," he repeated doggedly.
"But I've told you it's all right! No one's going to worry. My room is at the far end of the passage from yours—the last door on the left—and there's no one anywhere near. Anyhow, nobody dreams of stirring out of their rooms after eleven o'clock in this house."
He stared at her without finding a word to utter.
"Rory—my sweet——"
"In the name of God, child, don't go on like that! It's no good. I ought never to have come here."
He found the sweat breaking out on his forehead as he loosed his hold of her.
Primrose said incredulously:
"D'you mean you're not coming to me to-night?"
"I've told you I'm not."
Primrose was silent for a moment, looking at him, then she said, in the curt, slashing tones that she affected under the stress of anger or disconcertment:
"Thanks for the flowers, darling. And next time, when you've got over your panic, don't bother to come and explain things to me, because you won't find me."
There was the sound of footfalls coming down the stairs.
"Primrose—will you please let me talk to you to-morrow?"
"I shouldn't think so."
"Please, darling."
"I'm not like you. I think all this talking is idiotic and gets people just nowhere."
Valentine reached the bottom step.
"Jess and Madeleine are listening-in to a dance band in Madeleine's room. Madeleine was my mother's French maid, years ago," Valentine said, addressing Lonergan.
"So what?" drawled Primrose, and without further word she, in her turn, went up the stairs, leaving Valentine and Rory Lonergan alone by the fire in the hall.
They were both silent, Valentine stirring a log on the hearth with her foot, Lonergan motionless, seeking to fight down the sense of extreme discomfiture left by his scene with Primrose, and to establish within himself some kind of mental and emotional equilibrium.
He could not have told how long they had stood, speechless, when it occurred to him that Valentine, too, had found readjustment necessary. The atmosphere of hostility that Primrose's last words had created could hardly have failed to move her mother painfully.
Lonergan felt very sorry. On an impulse to do something for her, he pushed one of the armchairs nearer the fire.
"Will you not sit down and stay for a little while?" he asked gently.
She smiled and seated herself, and Lonergan took the chair opposite.
He was taken by surprise when she said with a simplicity that added dignity to her directness:
"Did you know that we were going to meet again?"
"Not until this evening, just before I got here. I'd only heard your married name and it didn't convey anything to me. Did you know?"
"When I heard that an Irish colonel called Lonergan might be coming, I felt that it might probably be you. And then Jess heard your first name, and I knew."
"It's curious."
"Very," she assented.
"Do you know that you've altered very little?" he said. "I don't mean that I'd have known you anywhere, as the saying goes, but that, essentially, you've kept so much of the girl I used to see in the Pincio Gardens."
"Essentially, I suppose I have. I often feel that I'm still almost as immature as I was then. It's a silly thing to say about a woman of forty-four, but it's true, I think."
"Yes," said Lonergan. "It's what I meant. Is that impertinent of me?"
She shook her head.
"Tell me about yourself. You've not stayed immature, at all events, although in appearance you've altered less than I have. That's astonishing. Did you go on painting?"
"I did, after a fashion. But the war of 1914 was an interruption, and then I went home to Ireland for a bit and did no good there, and after my mother died I left my sister Nellie—who was predestined for an old maid—to look after my father, and went to Paris. I'm just not good enough, you know, though I've been able to make a living with illustration work, and drawing for various papers, and an occasional portrait."
"And now you're in the Army again."
"Believe you me, that's no hardship. The war came at the very moment when I was sick of Paris, sick of France, sick of myself—only looking for an excuse to turn my back on the whole thing."
"So it came when you needed it."
"It did."
Lonergan allowed no hesitation to interfere with the sound of finality in his short answer, yet he felt himself to be on the verge of adding to it with an admission as unnecessary as it might prove unwise.
He had decided on silence when Valentine's next words shattered his determination.
"Have you ever married?"
"I have not. But it came to the same thing. We lived together for ten years, till she died, in 1934. She was