Luncheon was his
time, and those empty hours at the end of the afternoon which London fills
in with tea and Soho with drinks.
He seemed to have a very wide and catholic acquaintance among people of all
ranks and stations in life; one could hardly call them friendships, for he
lunched or sipped an aperti not often with the same person twice in a blue
moon. And whether his companion were a curate or some ragged wastrel of the
quarter; painted young person from the chorus of the newest revue or proper
matron from Bayswater; keen adventurer from Fleet Street or solid merchant
from the City, his attitude was much the same: easy, impersonal,
unaffected, courteous, detached. He was as apt as not (going on his facial
expression) to be mooning about Sofia when his guest was gesticulating
wildly and uttering three hundred words a minute. When he spoke it was
modestly, in a voice of agreeable cadences but pitched so low that Sofia
never but twice heard anything he said; and his manner was not
characterized by brisk decision. All the same, one noticed that he had, as
a rule, the last word, that what he said left his hearer either satisfied
or pensive.
He was unmistakably silly about Sofia; though that didn't impress her, too
many of the regulars were just as hard hit, one more or less didn't count.
But he never stared to the point of rudeness, and it always seemed to make
him hugely uncomfortable if she appeared in the least aware of his
adoration; and Mama Therese and Papa Dupont never even noticed him, so
circumspect was he.
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