Two young gentlemen of that peculiar breed, at once forward and shy,
found in the Regent's Park, came by on their way to lawn tennis, and he
noted with disapproval their furtive stares of admiration. A loitering
gardener halted to do something unnecessary to a clump of pampas grass;
he, too, wanted an excuse for peeping. A gentleman, old, and, by his
hat, a professor of horticulture, passed three times to scrutinize her
long and stealthily, a queer expression about his lips.
With all these men young Jolyon felt the same vague irritation. She
looked at none of them, yet was he certain that every man who passed
would look at her like that.
Her face was not the face of a sorceress, who in every look holds out to
men the offer of pleasure; it had none of the 'devil's beauty' so highly
prized among the first Forsytes of the land; neither was it of that
type, no less adorable, associated with the box of chocolate; it was not
of the spiritually passionate, or passionately spiritual order, peculiar
to house-decoration and modern poetry; nor did it seem to promise to
the playwright material for the production of the interesting and
neurasthenic figure, who commits suicide in the last act.
In shape and colouring, in its soft persuasive passivity, its sensuous
purity, this woman's face reminded him of Titian's 'Heavenly Love,' a
reproduction of which hung over the sideboard in his dining-room. And
her attraction seemed to be in this soft passivity, in the feeling she
gave that to pressure she must yield.
For what or whom was she waiting, in the silence, with the trees
dropping here and there a leaf, and the thrushes strutting close on
grass, touched with the sparkle of the autumn rime? Then her charming
face grew eager, and, glancing round, with almost a lover's jealousy,
young Jolyon saw Bosinney striding across the grass.
Curiously he watched the meeting, the look in their eyes, the long
clasp of their hands. They sat down close together, linked for all their
outward discretion. He heard the rapid murmur of their talk; but what
they said he could not catch.
He had rowed in the galley himself! He knew the long hours of waiting
and the lean minutes of a half-public meeting; the tortures of suspense
that haunt the unhallowed lover.
It required, however, but a glance at their two faces to see that this
was none of those affairs of a season that distract men and women about
town; none of those sudden appetites that wake up ravening, and are
surfeited and asleep again in six weeks. This was the real thing! This
was what had happened to himself! Out of this anything might come!