nothing about her except that she was beautiful and dined with eminent persons and entertained distinguished foreigners when they came to London. Perhaps, at bottom, that was why Digby liked her flat, because what pleased him most in London was the number of people who were doing terribly important things the necessity for which he could never understand. For over twelve years he had been going to her house, but the things that went on there were no more intelligible to him than they had been in the beginning, and Mrs. Marwood remained an admirable mystery.
And now suddenly she had become a menace, the nature of which Digby could not fathom. Dressed for calling, he called on her—patent-leather boots, chamois gloves, yellow cane, silk' hat. He stared distastefully at the door of her flat and when it was opened handed in his card and bolted breathlessly, saying to himself:
"I will write."
He found it difficult to write, but at last squeezed out of himself a bare statement that he was going to be married, though the words he used did not in the least describe the process through which he was passing. They had seemed well enough with his friends and relations, but with Mrs. Marwood they were inadequate; but when he looked back on it he found that he had always felt that life itself was just a little inadequate for the lady, whose tragedy it was that, in her own eyes, she had been born twenty years before her time. Digby had admired her for being tragic, and when he was very young he used to sit for hours while she talked about it, and told him the things that great men had said about her: "A woman in stone watching Time go by." That was one of the phrases, but the best were in French, a language which Digby did not understand.
All these things trickled through his brain as he wrote, and filled him with an increasing distaste and uneasiness. Even writing long silly letters to Stella did not relieve him, because the more he wrote the more incredible seemed the thing that had happened to him.
At last the day came when, armed with his solicitor's statement of his unimpeachable financial condition, he was to visit Stella's parents. He was received at the door of the modern Jacobean suburban country house by Stella with her arm round Mrs. Marwood's waist. Stella beamed, Mrs. Marwood beamed. Digby reeled.
"I am so delighted," said Mrs. Marwood. "I have known Stella since she was a baby."
