Flaming Youth

CHAPTER XXXIV

"Aren't you afraid you'll miss your train, Mr. Graves?"

"I'm not going to the train."

"You're carrying that satchel for exercise?"

"I'm wishing it onto the parcels stand while I take a delightful young lady to luncheon."

"Surely you must be keeping her waiting."

"I'm daring to hope she'll come with me while I pry myself from this baggage. Will you, Pat?"

"Oh; you're asking me to lunch with you?"

"Such is my dark and deadly purpose."

"I ought not to. But I want to."

He laughed delightedly. "You haven't changed a bit inside and most marvellously outside. Then you'll come?"

"You'd make a fortune as a mind-reader. There's a condition though."

"Name it; it's agreed to."

"That you'll forget all about that foolishness of ours at the party. I was only fourteen."

It was his turn to flush. "You make me ashamed of myself," he said with such charming sincerity that Pat let fall a friendly and forgiving hand upon his arm for a second. "But let me tell you this. When I left your[Pg 320] house that night I was more than a little in love with you. Oh, calf-love, doubtless. But—it makes it a little better, doesn't it?"

"Yes," answered Pat gravely. "It makes it a lot better—for both of us."

"Then we'll forget all of it that you'd wish forgotten," said he.

In her italicised moments Pat would have described the luncheon that followed as "too enticing." But Pat did not feel stressful in the company of Warren Graves; she felt quiet and attentive, and wonderfully receptive to the breath of the greater world which he brought to her. He had been in the diplomatic service since the war, in several European capitals, had read and thought and mingled with men who were making or marring not the politics alone, but the very geography of the malleable earth. After a little light talk, in which Pat was conscious that he was trying her out, the rapprochement of their minds was established and he settled down to talk with her as if she had been a woman of the international world in which he moved. Her swift, apprehensive intelligence kept him up to his best form. As the coffee was finished he said reproachfully:

"You've made me chatter my head off. And I'm supposed to have rather a gift for silence. How do you work your spells?"

"By being sunk in admiring interest," she answered, smiling up at him as she put on her gloves. "You've given me the most delightful hour I've had for years."

"But it needn't end here, need it?" he protested anxiously. "Don't you want to go to a matinée, or something?"

"There aren't any. It's Friday."

"So it is. But there are always the movies."

[Pg 321]
Pat knew that she ought not to go; there were a dozen important errands to be done. But: "Oh, very well," she said. Duties could wait. Pleasure was something you had to grab before it got away from you. The philosophy of the flapper.

At the "motion picture palace" they got box seats, the chairs suggestively close together. She wondered whether he would try to hold her hand; also whether she would let him if he did. Probably she would; there was no harm in that, and it gave a pleasant sense of companionship. Most of the boys with whom she went to the theatre or movies expected it. Apparently Warren Graves didn't. He made no move in that direction. Piqued a little, nevertheless Pat liked him the better for it. Monty might perhaps have objected if he knew. And, with a start, she discovered that only just then had she thought of Monty Standish. He had been, for the time, quite forgotten in the interest of a more enlivening and demanding association.