"Mr. Heath," she said, slightly protruding her chin, "when you've done with my only mother"--Mrs. Shiffney's lips tightened ever so little--"I want you to be very nice to me."

"Please tell me," said Heath, with the almost anxious eagerness that seemed to be characteristic of him.

Mrs. Mansfield fixed her blazing eyes on her daughter, slightly drawing down her gray eyebrows.

"Well, it's rather a secret."

Charmian glanced round at the others, then she added:

"It's about the Nutcracker."

"The Nutcracker!"

Heath puckered up his forehead.

"Yes." She moved a little, and looked at the chair not far from the fire on which she had sat when first she came into the room. "I care rather for boxing. Now"--she went slowly toward the chair, followed by Heath, "what I want to know, and what you can tell me, is this"--she sat down, and leaned her chin on her upturned palm--"on _present_ form do you believe the Nutcracker is up to Conky Ja-ky Joe?"

As Claude Heath sat down to reply to this question, Mrs. Shiffney said:

"Conky Jarky Joe! I thought I was _dans le mouvement_ up to my dog-collar, but I know nothing about the phenomenon. Where does it belong to?"

"Wonderland," said Elliot, in a gravely romantic voice.

"That's the land I've never seen, although I've had the yacht for so many years."

"Nor I!" said Paul Lane. "I don't believe it exists, or we must have been there. We have both been everywhere."

"Tell the poor things about it," said Mrs. Mansfield. "Then Adelaide can get up steam on _The Wanderer_ and realize her dreams."

"But Mr. Elliot told me he met you there, and I remember distinctly his saying the fight was on between those two pets of the ring," said Charmian plaintively, after a certain amount of negation from Claude Heath.

"Yes, but I'm sure he didn't tell you I was an authority on boxing form."

"You aren't?"

"No, indeed!"

"But you want to be?"

"I shouldn't mind. But it isn't my chief aim in life."

Charmian was silent. She leaned back, taking her chin from her hand, and at last said gravely:

"It isn't _that_, then?"

"That--what?" exclaimed Heath, looking at her and away from her.

"That you want. It's something else. Because you know you want a very, very great deal of something."

"Oh, a good many of us do, I suppose."

"I don't think I do. I'm quite satisfied with my life. I have a good mother, a comfortable home. What should a properly-brought-up English girl, who has been educated at Brighton, want more?"

"I'm very glad indeed to know that a Brighton education stands its receiver in such good stead in the after years, very glad indeed!"

"You are laughing at me. And that's unchristian."

"Oh, but--but you were laughing at me!"

Despite Heath's eagerness, and marked social readiness of manner, Charmian was disagreeably conscious of a mental remoteness in him. Only the tip of his mind, perhaps scarcely that, was in touch with hers. Now she almost regretted that she had chosen to begin their acquaintance with absurdity, that she had approached Heath with a pose. She scarcely knew why she had done so. But she half thought, only half because of her self-respect, that she had been a little afraid of him, and so had instinctively caught up some armor, put a shield in front of her. Was she really impressed by a well-spoken-of Te Deum? She glanced at Heath inscrutably, as only woman can, and knew that she was not. It was the man himself who had caused her to fall into what she already thought of as a mistake. There was in Heath something that almost confused her. And she was not accustomed to be confused.

"I've made a bad beginning," she almost blurted out, not able to escape from artifice, yet speaking truth. "And I'm generally rather good at beginnings. It's so easy to take the first step, I think, despite that silly saying which, of course, I'm not going to quote. It's when one is getting to know a person really well that difficulties generally begin."

"Do they?"

"Yes, because it's then that very reserved people begin hurriedly building barricades, isn't it? I ask you, because I'm not at all reserved."

"But how should I know any better than you?"

"You mean, when you're so unreserved, too? No, that's true."

Heath's eyes troubled Charmian. She was feeling with every moment less at ease in his companionship and more determined to seem at ease. Being generally self-possessed, she had a horror of slipping into shyness and so retrograding from her usual vantage ground. She expected him to speak. It was his turn. But he said nothing. She felt sure that he had seen through her last lie, and that he was secretly resenting it as a heavy-footed approach to sacred ground. What a blunderer she was to-night! Desperation seized her.

"We must leave the question to the reserved," she said. "Poor things! I always pity them. They can never taste life as you and I and our kind are able to. We are put here to try to know and to be known. I feel sure of that. So the reserved are for ever endeavoring to escape their destiny. No wonder they are punished!"

"I am not sure that I entirely agree with your view as to the reason why we are put here," observed Heath, without a trace of obvious sarcasm.

Nevertheless, the mere words stung Charmian's almost childish self-conceit.

"But I wasn't claiming to have pierced the Creator's most secret designs!" she exclaimed. "I was simply endeavoring to state that it can scarcely be natural for men and women to try to hide all they are from each other. I think there's something ugly in hiding things; and ugliness can't be meant."

"Ugliness is certainly not meant," said Heath, and for the first time she felt as if she were somewhere not very far from him. "Except very often by man. Isn't it astonishing that men created Venice and that men have now put steam launches in the ca.n.a.ls of Venice!"

Venice! Charmian seized upon the word, mentally leaped upon and clung to the city in the sea. From that moment their conversation became easier, and gradually Charmian began to recover from her strange social prostration. So she thought of it. She forced the note, no doubt.

Afterward she was unpleasantly conscious of that. But at any rate the talk flowed. There was some give and take. The joints of their intercourse did not creak as if despairingly appealing to be oiled. Of course it was very ba.n.a.l to talk about Italy. But, still, these moments must come sometimes to all those who go much into the world. And what is Italy, beautiful, siren-like Italy, for if not to be talked about?

Charmian said that to herself afterward, and was amazed at her own vulgarity of mind. Ah, yes! That was what she had disliked in Claude Heath--his faculty of making her feel almost vulgar-minded, vulgar-intellected! She coined horrible b.a.s.t.a.r.d words in her efforts to condemn him. But all that was later on, when she had even said good-night to her only mother.

Their tete-a-tete was broken by Mrs. Shiffney's departure to a reception at the Ritz. She must surely have been disappointed in the musician; but, if so, she was too clever to show it. And she was by way of being a good-natured woman and seldom seemed to think ill of anybody. "I have so many sins on my own conscience," she sometimes said, "that I decline to see other people's. I want them to be blind to mine. Sin and let sin is an excellent rule in social life." She seldom condemned anyone except a bore.

"If you ever pay a call, which I doubt," she said to Claude Heath as she was going, "I'm in Grosvenor Square. The Red Book will tell you."

She looked at him with her almost insolently self-possessed and careless eyes, and added:

"Perhaps some day you'll come on the yacht and show me the course to set for Wonderland. Mr. Elliot says you know it. And of course we all want to. I've been everywhere except there."

"I doubt if a yacht could take us there," said Heath, smiling as if to cover something grave or sad.

A piercing look again came into Mrs. Shiffney's eyes.

"I really hope I shall see you in Grosvenor Square," she said.