• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“At what?”

“Well, it sounds rather silly. I was in your bedroom, kissing things—you know, pillows, pajamas, hair brushes. I’d just got to the washstand and was kissing your razor when I looked up and found Mrs. Whatever-she’s-called standing in the door.”

“Good God, I shall never be able to look her in the face again.”

“Oh, she was quite sympathetic. I suppose I must have looked funny, like a goose grazing.” She gave a little, rather hysterical giggle, and added, “Oh, John, I do love you so.”

“Nonsense. I shall turn you out if you talk like that.”

“Well, I do. And I’ve got you a present.” She gave me the square parcel. “Open it.”

“I shan’t accept it,” I said unwrapping a box of cigars.

“But you must. You see, they’d be no good to me, would they? Are they good ones?”

“Yes,” I said, looking at the box. “Very good ones indeed.”

“The best?”

“Quite the best, but . . .”

“That’s what the man in the shop said. Smoke one now.”

“Julia dear, I couldn’t. I’ve only just finished breakfast.”

She saw the point of that. “When will you smoke the first one? After luncheon? I’d like to think of you smoking the first one.”

“Julia, dear, it’s perfectly sweet of you, but I can’t, honestly . . .”

“I know what you’re thinking, that I can’t afford it. Well, that’s all right. You see, Lucy gave me five pounds yesterday to buy a hat. I thought she would—she often does. But I had to wait and be sure. I’d got them ready, hidden yesterday evening. I meant to give you them then. But I never got a proper chance. So here they are.” And then, as I hesitated, with rising voice, “Don’t you see I’d much rather give you cigars than have a new hat? Don’t you see I shall go back to Aldershot absolutely miserable, the whole time in London quite spoilt, if you won’t take them?”

She had clearly been crying that morning and was near tears again.

“Of course I’ll take them,” I said. “I think it’s perfectly sweet of you.”

Her face cleared in sudden, infectious joy.

“There. Now we can say good-bye.”

She stood waiting for me, not petitioning this time, but claiming her right. I put my hands on her shoulders and gave her a single, warm kiss on the lips. She shut her eyes and sighed. “Thank you,” she said in a small voice, and hurried out to her waiting taxi, leaving the box of cigars on my table.

Sweet Julia! I thought; it was a supremely unselfish present; something quite impersonal and unsentimental—no keepsake—something which would be gone, literally in smoke, in less than six weeks; a thing she had not even the fun of choosing for herself; she had gone to the counter and left it to the shopman—“I want a box of the best cigars you keep, please—as many as I can get for five pounds.” She just wanted something which she could be sure would give pleasure.

And chiefly because she thought I had been kind to her cousin, Lucy took me into her friendship.

Roger’s engraving showed a pavilion, still rigidly orthodox in plan, but, in elevation decked with ornament conceived in a wild ignorance of oriental forms; there were balconies and balustrades of geometric patterns; the cornice swerved upwards at the corners in the lines of a pagoda; the roof was crowned with an onion cupola which might have been Russian, bells hung from the capitals of barley-sugar columns; the windows were freely derived from the Alhambra; there was a minaret. To complete the atmosphere the engraver had added a little group of Turkish military performing the bastinado upon a curiously complacent malefactor, an Arabian camel and a mandarin carrying a bird in a cage.

“My word, what a gem,” they said. “Is it really all there?”

“The minaret’s down and it’s all rather overgrown.”

“What a chance. John must get it.”

“It will be fun to furnish. I know just the chairs for it.”

This was the first time I had been to Victoria Square since Julia left.

And Lucy said, “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that.”

II

Lucy was a girl of few friends; she had, in fact, at the time I was