GITA was only half-dressed when she heard Polly’s voice downstairs. She had not slept until long after daylight. To her intense annoyance and perplexity her mind iterated and reiterated the scene between herself and Geoffrey Pelham. As a rule she fell asleep the moment she turned off the light, no matter how exciting the preceding hours may have been, and she looked upon Pelham almost with awe that he could disturb the habit of a lifetime. Even the ugly worries and agitations of the past had never interfered with sound healthy nights.
The moment she was encompassed by darkness she had been back in the Pleyden dining-room with Geoffrey Pelham’s voice in her ears, her eyes on his white strained face until she dropped them in consternation. She supposed that another woman, recalling a declaration from a man as attractive as that would have thrilled at the haunting memory; but her body was quiescent, it was only her brain that blazed like a bonfire. . . . She was not even sure he had captured her imagination, he had merely “started something.” . . .
No doubt her vanity. . . . But she had had a good many spasms of vanity this last year. She had been inordinately set up when she had made a conquest of Eustace Bylant. . . . Her mirror had received a good many confidences. Yes, she was as vain as a peacock. No need of a man more or less to keep it awake. Certainly wouldn’t keep her awake. . . .
She recalled the night of the manor ball when she and Pelham had sat alone in the drawing-room. He had outshone every man at the party in looks and distinction. . . . She remembered certain odd sensations. . . . Another Gita Carteret. That was it. No doubt if she had sat in that room two hundred years ago with a young man as handsome and winning as that she’d have fallen in love with him then and there. For the first time she was conscious of regret that such an exciting experience was denied her. It would be immeasurably interesting to love a man like Geoffrey Pelham—especially as he looked that night. Nothing very romantic about a man dressed like a waiter and eating chicken salad. . . .
That, perhaps, was it. Romance. It was not the dearth of sex-fires she was regretting—that idea was as abhorrent as ever—but the romances all those beautiful Carteret girls had experienced before her and handed down as her birthright. She would even have been glad if her mother—who would have been happier dead anyhow—could have gone when she was a child and her father had sent her to her grandmother. She would have grown up a true Carteret girl and come into her birthright. She might or might not have met Geoffrey Pelham but she would have had her romance sooner or later. . . . But no, she had met a good many men now, some of them charming and congenial enough. It would have been Geoffrey Pelham and no other. Perhaps they were both living again after two hundred years’ sleep and had once met and loved in that old manor. There had been something oddly aware that night—but that was nonsense. She might be too educated to assume that anything, including reincarnation, was fabulous, but she didn’t believe it all the same. It was merely the law of mutual attraction at work. Men and women were falling in love every day all over the world with no assistance from metempsychosis. . . . And she was by no means “in love.” Silly phrase. Moronotic. . . . What might have been and what was were two entirely different matters. It was merely that some subtle magnetic quality in his personality suggested romance—every girl’s birthright—or had that night. There was nothing very romantic about a surgeon always carving up people and getting blood all over himself . . . and they had to cut up corpses before they could do that, and hardly ever read anything but stiff medical journals.
. . . Still he did and that was the end of it. When that set grimness left his face it looked sensitive and eager, almost boyish . . . and no doubt he could be ardent enough. He was boxed up—had been—would have to be now more than ever if he loved her as much as he thought he did. She gave a sigh of pity. Poor devil. Why had he lit on her of all girls? Polly was——But she turned her thoughts away from Polly.
And Eustace. If she had grown up at Carteret Manor she never would have married Eustace; she’d have taken him on as a brother. He wouldn’t have done for a hero of romance at all, perfectly delightful as he was in so many ways. Odd, too. He and Geoffrey were not unlike. Both were fair, had much the same compact tall figures, both intellectual and the product of their times. Perhaps they both belonged to what Polly would call her “type,” and it was just that subtle difference that made Geoffrey romantic (in costume) and Eustace prosaic. Costume certainly didn’t improve him. He’d looked simply awful as old Cornbury. . . . It was nice to be married to dear Eustace. Not for a moment could she regret it. What use? No romance for her. But it was exciting to imagine what it would have been like if she had been one of those other Gita Carterets. She couldn’t even feel sad over it—too much of a philosopher, no doubt. She felt more like the heroine of a play—acting someone else’s lines but feeling the real thing for the moment. . . .
No wonder she had been upset at that very real declaration in that very prosaic dining-room. . . . Horribly upset. Thought she was going to faint. . . . Odd, though, she hadn’t felt . . . what was it. . . . What. . . . She yawned prodigiously and fell asleep.