Arthur & George

meant to be unformed; they are malleable, pliant, waiting to be shaped by the impress of the man they marry. They hide themselves; they watch and wait, they indulge in decorous social display (which should always fall short of coquetry) until such time as the man makes apparent his interest, and then his greater interest, and then his especial interest, by which time they are walking alone together, and the families have met, and finally he asks for her hand and sometimes, perhaps, in a last act of concealment, she makes him wait upon her answer. This is how it has all evolved, and social evolution has its laws and its necessities just as biological evolution does. It would not be thus if there were not a very good reason for its being thus.
    When he is introduced to Jean – at an afternoon tea party in the house of a prominent London Scotsman, the sort of event he normally avoids – he notices at once that she is a striking young woman. He knows from long experience what to expect: the striking young woman will ask him when he is going to write another Sherlock Holmes story, and did he really die at the Reichenbach Falls, and perhaps it would be better if the consulting detective were to marry, and how did he think up such an idea in the first place? And sometimes he answers with the weariness of a man wearing five overcoats, and sometimes he manages a faint smile and replies, ‘Your question, young lady, reminds me why I had the good sense to drop him over the Falls in the first place.’
    But Jean does none of this. She does not give an agreeable start at his name, or shyly confess herself a devoted reader. She asks him if he has seen the exhibition of photographs of Dr Nansen’s voyage to the far North.
    ‘Not yet. Although I was present at the Albert Hall last month when he lectured to the Royal Geographical Society and received a medal from the Prince of Wales.’
    ‘So was I,’ she replies. This is unexpected.
    He tells her how, after reading Nansen’s account a few years previously of crossing Norway on skis, he acquired a pair of them; how from Davos he skiied the high slopes with the Branger brothers, and how Tobias Branger wrote ‘
Sportesmann
’ in the hotel registration book. Then he begins a story, which he often tells as an adjunct to this one, about losing his skis at the top of a snow-face and being obliged to come down without them, and how the strain on the seat of his tweed knickerbockers … and this really is one of his best stories, though perhaps in the present circumstances he will amend the conclusion about being happiest for the rest of the day when standing with his trouser-seat to a wall … but she seems to have stopped paying attention. Taken aback, he pauses.
    ‘I should like to learn to ski,’ she says.
    This is also unexpected.
    ‘I have excellent balance. I have ridden since I was three.’
    Arthur is somewhat piqued at not being allowed to finish his story about tearing his knickerbockers, which includes mimicry of his tailor’s assurances about the durability of Harris tweed. So he tells her firmly that it is most unlikely that women – by which he means society women, as opposed to female Swiss peasants – will ever learn to ski, given the physical strength required and the dangers attendant on the activity.
    ‘Oh, I am quite strong,’ she replies. ‘And I imagine I have better balance than you, given your size. It must be an advantage to have a lower centre of gravity. And being much less heavy, I should not do so much damage were I to fall.’
    Had she said ‘less heavy’ he might have taken offence at such pertness. Because she says ‘much less heavy’ he bursts out laughing, and promises, one day, to teach her to ski.
    ‘I shall hold you to it,’ she replies.
    It was all a rather extraordinary encounter, he reflects to himself in the subsequent days. The way she declined to acknowledge his fame as a writer, set the subject of the conversation, interrupted one of his most popular stories, exhibited an ambition some might call unladylike, and laughed – well, as good as laughed – at his size. And yet she managed to do it all lightly, seriously, enchantingly. Arthur congratulates himself on not having taken offence, even if none was intended. He feels something he has not felt for years: the self-satisfaction of the successful flirt. And then he forgets her.
    Six weeks later he walks into a musical afternoon and she is singing one of Beethoven’s