“Who is she, Gerald?”
Trevor regarded the young man severely.
“She,” he said, “is a woman of quality.”
“Oh!” cried the very young man; and Trevor was really surprised into his jerky little smile by the sudden pleasure of the exclamation.
“Gerald, you have said a marvellous thing—oh, but you have! I never thought to hear that said about any woman, I’d forgotten that such a phrase was ever made by fine men for fine women—a woman of quality! And here you’ve been ranting a lot of worldly-wisdom stuff for the last half-hour, keeping this pearl of price inside you until the magic of a voice dragged it out! Pah!...”
“A woman of quality!” And Ivor repeated the words softly, tasting in them wine finer than champagne and older than Falernian, while Trevor enjoyed the comedy of his chance phrase. Next time, he comically thought, it will not happen so accidentally.
Ivor was of an age which can confuse the precious and the beautiful into one dim, magnificent whole; and that chance, outmoded phrase had somehow lit a great light, an absurdly great light, within him, it seemed to him so coloured with forgotten splendours and luxuries of race and manners. Everything desirable, everything exquisite, everything damnable, everything that could bewitch his mind and heart, seemed to lie in and about that phrase. It fired him, it so completely contained the rarest secrets of fineness—for him, anyway! He wouldn’t, he thought grandly, ever cheapen that phrase. They were words to fit an ideal. (He was only twenty-three, after all; and he had drunk his share of a bottle of champagne.)
“Tell me more of ‘this woman of quality’” he begged Gerald Trevor.
“Oh, no!” cried Trevor. “I’m just too old to make theories out of facts—especially feline facts. Besides, you will soon be meeting her for yourself——”
“But I haven’t as yet.”