Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to mention that she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs. Memorall for a year or more, and had somewhat contemptuously classified her as the kind of woman who runs cheap excursions to celebrities; when one afternoon she remarked, as she put a second lump of sugar in his tea:
“Is it right this time? You’re almost as particular as Mary Anerton.”
“Yes, I never _can_ remember how she likes her tea. Either it’s lemon _with_ sugar, or lemon without sugar, or cream without either, and whichever it is must be put into the cup before the tea is poured in; and if one hasn’t remembered, one must begin all over again. I suppose it was Vincent Rendle’s way of taking his tea and has become a sacred rite.”
“Do you _know_ Mrs. Anerton?” cried Danyers, disturbed by this careless familiarity with the habits of his divinity.
“‘And did I once see Shelley plain?’ Mercy, yes! She and I were at school together--she’s an American, you know. We were at a _pension_ near Tours for nearly a year; then she went back to New York, and I didn’t see her again till after her marriage. She and Anerton spent a winter in Rome while my husband was attached to our Legation there, and she used to be with us a great deal.” Mrs. Memorall smiled reminiscently. “It was _the_ winter.”
“Precisely--but unluckily I left Rome just before the meeting took place. Wasn’t it too bad? I might have been in the _Life and Letters_. You know he mentions that stupid Madame Vodki, at whose house he first saw her.”
“And did you see much of her after that?”
“Not during Rendle’s life. You know she has lived in Europe almost entirely, and though I used to see her off and on when I went abroad, she was always so engrossed, so preoccupied, that one felt one wasn’t wanted. The fact is, she cared only about his friends--she separated herself gradually from all her own people. Now, of course, it’s different; she’s desperately lonely; she’s taken to writing to me now and then; and last year, when she heard I was going abroad, she asked me to meet her in Venice, and I spent a week with her there.”
Mrs. Memorall smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I never was allowed a peep at _him_; none of her old friends met him, except by accident. Ill-natured people say that was the reason she kept him so long. If one happened in while he was there, he was hustled into Anerton’s study, and the husband mounted guard till the inopportune visitor had departed. Anerton, you know, was really much more ridiculous about it than his wife. Mary was too clever to lose her head, or at least to show she’d lost it--but Anerton couldn’t conceal his pride in the conquest. I’ve seen Mary shiver when he spoke of Rendle as _our poet_. Rendle always had to have a certain seat at the dinner-table, away from the draught and not too near the fire, and a box of cigars that no one else was allowed to touch, and a writing-table of his own in Mary’s sitting-room--and Anerton was always telling one of the great man’s idiosyncrasies: how he never would cut the ends of his cigars, though Anerton himself had given him a gold cutter set with a star-sapphire, and how untidy his writing-table was, and how the house-maid had orders always to bring the waste-paper basket to her mistress before emptying it, lest some immortal verse should be thrown into the dust-bin.”