The last act of the mimic story dragged on. Agatha and Lady Lelant were absorbed in it. Lucy withdrew a little from the front of the box. She cared nothing for the play, nor did her companion. Both of them knew of things imminent in their twin lives greater than any mimic business could suggest to them.
He began to tell her in a low voice of his joy in seeing her again. It thrilled her to hear the lover-like tones creeping into a voice so clear, cold, and self-contained in all the ordinary affairs of life. It was an experience that disturbed and swayed all the instincts of her sex. For she knew that this was no ordinary conquest that she had made, no ordinary tribute to her mind and person. She might have received the highest compliment that he was about to pay her from many a man as highly placed and socially fortunate as he. There was no exhilaration, no subtle flattery of her pride and the consciousness of her womanhood in that. But she knew him for what he was. She had learned of the intellect and power of the man--herein lay an exquisite pleasure in his surrender. And she liked him immensely. Physically, he pleased her eye, and her sense of what was fitting in a man. Mentally he compelled her. And now and again in their intimacy, an intimacy that had grown enormously during the last year, fostered on their mutual epistolary confidences, she had found a sudden surrender, a boyish leaning on her, a waiting for her approving or helpful word, that was sweet to her.
"Now, then," Poyntz said, "we'll go and have tea on the terrace at the Sardinia. There will be a band, a really good band, and the embankment will look beautiful just now. Come along, young ladies; we'll walk, shall we? It won't take us five minutes." They left the theatre.
"Ah!" Lucy said with a sudden gasp of relief, "how good the air is after that dark place and the stage. My eyes feel as if they had been actually burnt."
The long lights of the summer afternoon irradiated everything. There are moments in summer when the busiest London street seems like a street in fairy-land. It was so now as they walked to the great riverside hotel; a tender haze of gold lay over all the vast buildings, the sky began to be as if it were hung with banners.