when you’ve found the ace that you don’t value the rest of the hand so much.”
“I don’t follow. Explain,” said Peter.
“Well, this kind of thing. For instance, if you found the ace, that is to say, if you fell tremendously in love, you might not care about the rest of the hand. If the adorable was in my bedroom, two windows off, and if she was locked in there, and if the house was on fire——”
“Any more ‘ifs’?” asked Peter.
“Not one. But supposing all these things, you would instantly get out on to that cornice, at peril of your life, and shuffle your way along it. You would have to be with her. You wouldn’t give two thoughts as to what might happen to you.”
Peter thought this over.
“I should be a consummate ass, then,” he remarked. “A fellow with a grain of sense would go down the passage and bash the door in.”
“But let’s pretend that for some reason you couldn’t. If the only way of reaching the room was along the cornice you would go.”
Peter looked at the ledge.
“And if I got there in safety, what then?” he asked. “I couldn’t carry her back along the ledge.”
“But that wouldn’t prevent your going,” said she. “Whatever the risk to yourself was, and however useless your going was, you would go.”
Peter was silent a moment, frowning.
“I feel as if all this has happened before,” he said. “Do you know that feeling? Did we ever sit here before and talk about just this?”
“Not that I remember. No, I’m sure we never have. Isn’t it odd, that sensation? Does it seem to you like remembrance of a previous occasion, or a presentiment of a future one?”
“Or a slightly faulty action of the two lobes of the brain?” said Peter. “What were we talking about? Aces?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean about throwing the rest of your hand away for the sake of an ace.”
Peter looked at his watch.
“I must go,” he said. “I’ve got to get home to dress, and rush back to the Ritz to dine early before the opera.”
“Oh, not just yet,” said she. “But I wish you wouldn’t live in South Kensington. Why do you?”
Peter had a direct glance and a direct answer for this.
“Because it’s cheaper living with my father and mother than being on my own,” he said. “Also——”
“Well?” she asked.
“I was going to say because they like having me with them,” said he. “But I don’t think that’s true, so I didn’t say it. I mean, if I had plenty of money I should take a flat of my own, quite regardless of whether they liked to have me with them.”
Nellie gave a little sigh, with a click of impatience at the end of it.
“There’s an odd kind of honesty about you,” she said. “You state that sort of thing quite baldly, whereas I should conceal it. If I had been you I should have said that I lived at home because my mother liked having me with her. It wouldn’t have been true, but I should have said it. Very likely by saying it often I should have got to believe it.”
“Nobody else would have,” remarked Peter.
“You’re rather a brute, my dear,” said she. “Go away to South Kensington.”
“I’m going. But about aces for one second more. Have you found your ace, Nellie? Don’t bother to answer.”
“That is spoken like a rather spiteful woman,” was Nellie’s perfectly justifiable rejoinder.
“Maybe. I’m your spiteful sister,” said Peter.
He walked gracefully and gently over to the card-table.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Heaton,” he said. “Nellie and I have had a lovely talk. I hope you’ve won every rubber.”
“And three aces, thirty,” said Mrs. Heaton. “Good-bye, dear Peter. I suppose you’ll be at the Opera to-night. Parsifal. My deal? So it is.”
CHAPTER II
Peter descended from these heights into the hot dusty well of the streets, and soon was on his way home to dress and return to the Ritz, where an early dinner preceded the opera and any other diversions that might present themselves. On this sweltering June evening the top of a bus was a cooler progression than a taxi, besides advancing the sacred cause of economy, which he had just confessed was more real to him than that of filial piety, and at Hyde Park Corner he could catch a conveyance that would deposit him not fifty yards from his father’s house. Coolness and economy were sufficiently strong of themselves to make him board it with alacrity, and the detachment of a front seat just suited the meditative mood which his talk with Nellie had induced.
Peter knew himself and her pretty well, and with the admirable contributions she had made to their discussion there was little to puzzle out, but much to appraise and estimate. The notion that the news of her engagement had been a blow of any sharp or stunning quality could be at once dismissed, for never had he known so well, as when she, earlier in the day, had communicated the news of her engagement to him over the telephone (that was like her), how whole-heartedly he was not in love with her, and how unintelligibly alien to him, as she had pointed out, was that emotion. During the last year which had witnessed a very decent flowering of intimacy between him and her, there had never been, on either side, the least attempt at love-making; their relations had been wholly free from sentiment, and not once had either of them tripped or stuttered over the foreign use of love-language. But in ways wholly unsentimental they had certainly arrived at some extremely close relation of intimacy; there had emphatically been a bond between them, which to his mind her engagement, if it did not actually loosen it, would shift, so to speak, on to a new place; the harness must be worn elsewhere. If it was to be maintained, he, at any rate, must accustom himself to its new adjustment. She had defined that comradeship this afternoon in a way that was rather surprising, for the ideal relation of him to her, apparently, was that of a brother, or, with greater precision, that of a sister. That had not struck him before, but even when first presented, it did not in the least puzzle him. Indeed, it satisfactorily accounted for that elimination of sex which had always marked their intimacy. She had not sought the male element in him, nor he in her the female. So far he was in complete agreement with the casual conclusion they had jointly arrived at, but at that point Peter detected the presence of something that seemed to show a lurking fallacy somewhere. For he had no doubt that if he had been rich, he would before now have proposed to her, and in spite of her provision that, since riches were an attribute of a man and not an external accident, they turned him into a different person, and that thus she could not tell whether she would have accepted him or not, he did not, for himself, believe that she would have hesitated in doing so. Finally, as material to meditate upon, came her firm statement that though Peter did not want or intend to marry
