“Were you lonely?” she asked.
“Oh, Lord, no,” he said. “There were regiments of relatives and others. Aunts and uncles galore and cousins abounding. I did not see the relatives with any great regularity, but when I did I had a grand old time. I was among the oldest of the cousins and I was always big for my age—and I was a boy. I quite undeservedly found myself the leader of the pack, and I was expected to lead my youngers into mischief. Even the adults expected it. I almost always did what was expected of me. But it was innocent mischief—climbing forbidden trees, swimming in forbidden lakes, stamping through forbidden muddy puddles for the sheer joy of getting ourselves thoroughly dirty, hiding in hedgerows and jumping out at unwary travelers, shrieking like demented things.”
Her head was turned on his shoulder and the side of her forefinger stroked lightly along his jaw.
“I ought to have been sent away to school,” he said.
“You were lonely.”
“If I was,” he said, “I am not sure I particularly noticed. I was so terribly innocent, though. I was shocked down to my toenails when I discovered that studying was the very last thing a fellow was supposed to do at university. The height of accomplishment there was to drink one’s fellow imbibers under the table and to sleep with every barmaid in Oxford and its environs. Well, you know, Imogen, you did ask.”
“About your childhood,” she reminded him. “And you acquired these accomplishments, did you?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I thought I was there to learn, and that is what I did. It was not until the end that it suddenly dawned upon me that I was a thoroughly odd fellow and quite out of step with what being a gentleman was all about. I was a virgin when I came down from Oxford. And that, my lady, is something I have not told any other living soul. I am discovering that it is fatal to engage in conversation with a woman after two o’ clock in the morning.”
Deuced embarrassing, actually. What the devil had possessed him to divulge that particular detail from his inglorious past? A twenty-year-old male virgin, no less.
“I wish you had not told me,” she said. “I would have preferred to cling, at least in part, to my original impression of you.”
“Oh, cling away,” he said. He removed his arm from about her and sat forward in order to drink his tea before it turned quite cold. “I very soon became the man you think me, Imogen—and you do not know the half of it. That old innocent who was once me has long faded into ancient history.”
“Of course he has not,” she said. “We are made up of everything we have ever been, Percy. It is the joy and the pain of our individuality. There are no two of us the same.”
He set his cup down and looked at her over his shoulder.
“The world will be very glad there is only one of me,” he said.
“But you have told me far more than the fact that you were still a virgin at the age of twenty or so,” she said. “And it is something else that probably no one else knows. Your image of yourself has taken a severe battering during the past ten years. Your life has become unbalanced, perhaps because the first twenty years were almost unalloyed happiness and diligence and security. You were both fortunate and unfortunate in that, Percy. And now you feel insecure and a bit worthless and not even sure that you like yourself. You need to find balance, but do not know quite how.”
He stared at her for several moments before getting abruptly to his feet, dislodging poor Hector again as he did so. He busied himself with poking the fire and putting on a few more coals.
“But not many of us ever do know quite how,” she continued quietly into the silence, and he had the feeling she was talking more to herself than to him. “Life is made up of opposing pairs—life and death, love and hatred, happiness and misery, light and darkness, and on and on to infinity. Finding balance and contentment is like trying to walk a tightrope between all those opposites without falling off on one side or the other and believing that life must be all light or all darkness, when neither one is the truth in itself.”
Good Lord! What was it about late, late-night conversations?
“You and me,” he said, turning fully to face her. “Another pair of opposites.”
The cat was on her lap. She was stroking its back and ears, and it was purring, its eyes closed in ecstasy. He was envious.
“I do beg your pardon,” she said. “How presumptuous of me to try analyzing your life and preaching at you.”
He set one foot on the hearth and rested one arm along the mantel. What was it about her? Her hair was scraped back so severely from her face that it almost made her eyes slant. Her shapeless dressing gown was belted about her waist like a sack. She had just been haranguing him like a prissy governess.