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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79006 ***
+
+
+
+
+                               THE HOTEL
+
+
+
+
+                               THE HOTEL
+
+
+                                   By
+                            ELIZABETH BOWEN
+
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                   LINCOLN MAC VEAGH · THE DIAL PRESS
+                       LONGMANS, GREEN & COMPANY
+                                TORONTO
+                                  1928
+
+
+
+
+                          Copyright, 1928, by
+                          The Dial Press, Inc.
+
+                         First issue in America
+                              April, 1928
+
+
+    MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE VAIL-BALLOU
+                     PRESS, INC., BINGHAMTON, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+                               THE HOTEL
+
+
+
+
+                                   I
+
+
+Miss Fitzgerald hurried out of the Hotel into the road. Here she stood
+still, looking purposelessly up and down in the blinding sunshine and
+picking at the fingers of her gloves. She was frightened by an interior
+quietness and by the thought that she had for once in her life stopped
+thinking and might never begin again. Ladies under discs of coloured
+shade from their parasols came walking down the middle of the road; they
+deflected their course to pass her. Their faces conveyed nothing, but
+now and then they would smile, and Miss Fitzgerald would feel her throat
+and chin contract as custom wrenched from her a small, stiff bow. She
+stood there helplessly, as though she were waiting for a friend.
+
+That Miss Fitzgerald should, after so violent an exit, simply continue
+to stand there had been beyond the calculations of Miss Pym. _She_,
+after a short blank pause of astonishment up in her room, had begun to
+creep down the stairs warily. She listened, she clung to the bannisters;
+taut for retreat at every turn of the staircase. The lift shaft rose
+direct from the lounge and the stairs bent round and round it; she
+stared down for a long time through the wire-netting case of the shaft
+to assure herself that the lounge was empty. It was. There was not a
+soul down there, not a movement among the shadows; it was eleven o’clock
+and everybody would have gone out to the shops or the library, up to the
+hills or down to the tennis-courts. Not a shadow crossed the veiled
+glass doors of the drawing-room to interrupt the glitter from the sea.
+Not a sound came up from the smoking-room. Miss Fitzgerald was not
+there.
+
+Miss Pym had been quite sure she _would_ not be there, but all the same
+she let out a sigh of relief. Miss Fitzgerald had gone out: having
+discharged with such bitterness of finality that last shot in her locker
+she must have fled. At this crisis of ungovernable agitation Emily (how
+well they knew each other!) would have taken to the hills. Miss Pym
+could see plainly her figure stumbling up in the glare towards the shade
+of the olive-trees, breast to breast with the increasing slope. She must
+be given a little longer to get away.
+
+Miss Pym, waiting about in the lounge, glanced back diffidently at the
+last few minutes and then turned round square and faced them. She was
+surprised to find herself cool, explanatory and reasonable. Her wait
+prolonged itself, the minutes seemed interminable; now and then she
+glanced at the lounge clock. She read the announcements pinned to the
+notice board, looked along the letter-rack and read the names on the
+envelopes stuck prominently on the concierge’s desk to await new
+arrivals. These long-forecast shadows forever darkening the threshold of
+the Hotel excited Miss Pym; for some new arrival that never arrived she
+was storing up tenderness. She found that they were to expect (quite
+soon perhaps), a clergyman, a Rev. J. D. L. Milton—_John?_ Three letters
+for him and something that looked like a bill (or perhaps a receipt) had
+been forwarded from an address she knew quite well, a country house in
+Derbyshire. Gratifying how one’s intimate world contracted itself, how
+one’s friends wove themselves in! Society was fascinating, like a jigsaw
+puzzle!
+
+Miss Pym heard somebody beginning to come downstairs and moved quickly
+back to the notice board. Those firm steps coming down unhurriedly in a
+light, continuous, increasing ripple sounded like Mrs. Kerr’s: it was
+Mrs. Kerr herself who appeared at the turn of the staircase, drawing her
+loose white gauntlets over her wrists. Without troubling to look down
+into the lounge, she called “Sydney ... Sydney,” as though she did not
+care to question or need to command but expected Sydney to take form
+somehow out of a limbo to which forgetfulness had consigned her, and be
+drawn up the stairs to where her friend stood beautifully, balanced
+either for advance or immobility.
+
+“Miss Warren isn’t here,” said Miss Pym. “She’ll have gone on down to
+the courts, I daresay: she went past me in the corridor with her racquet
+quite a little time ago.”
+
+Mrs. Kerr said “Thank you,” smiled and accepted this. She did not seem
+really to care whether Miss Warren were there or not, her “Sydney,
+Sydney” must have been quite perfunctory. “Well, _I_ shall go down to
+the courts,” she said, and came on down to take her parasol out of the
+rack. She was accustomed to leave her nice parasol leaning up in the
+rack there quite casually, for anybody to borrow, instead of taking it
+up to her room with her. Miss Pym watched eagerly and Mrs. Kerr must
+have felt a conjunction to be inevitable, for having made a show of
+hesitation between three parasols not at all like each other, and
+feeling Miss Pym still behind her she asked charmingly, hopefully: “And
+are _you_ going down?”
+
+Miss Pym never went near the tennis-courts, but a prospect of walking
+down there and appearing publicly with Mrs. Kerr was delightful (poor
+Emily, scrambling alone in the hills!) She abandoned a plan she had,
+still embryonic, of going alone to the shops and wondered whether their
+two names—her own and Mrs. Kerr’s—might not henceforward begin to be
+coupled. She had a queer little thrill and held open the swing-door with
+gratitude, almost with reverence. Mrs. Kerr with a vague inclination of
+the head passed out before her. They crossed the gravel together under
+the hundred windows of the Hotel.
+
+When they turned out of the gates, however, Miss Pym flinched and felt
+giddy. For there stood Miss Fitzgerald, twisting her fingers together
+and staring straight at them. Had she been awaiting them there, malign
+and patient; had they walked into an ambush? Then she saw how
+drained-out, void of intention Emily was. She seemed hardly to see them.
+She might have crept out here to bleed—but her wounded presence still
+was an outrage. Miss Pym looked away.
+
+“There’s Miss Fitzgerald!” said Mrs. Kerr pleasantly.
+
+“Oh?—Yes.”
+
+“Mustn’t she be waiting for you?”
+
+“I....”
+
+“You mustn’t let me be selfish,” said Mrs. Kerr.
+
+Miss Fitzgerald, who must gradually have brought them into focus,
+wheeled round nervously and hurried away. Everything that, abroad, an
+English lady takes out with her swung from her arm and bumped as she
+fled; the coloured straw satchel, the native umbrella, the golf jersey,
+the net bag supplementing the satchel. There streamed from them, to Miss
+Pym’s perception, a pitiful wraith. With all these, in shining readiness
+for the day’s excursion, Emily had presented herself at her friend’s
+door—less than an hour ago.
+
+“Going all by herself?” observed Mrs. Kerr.
+
+“Yes,” agreed Miss Pym, and after a moment cautiously licked her lips.
+
+Mrs. Kerr balancing her parasol on her shoulder walked on, looking ahead
+serenely. She did not seem to be wondering what on earth one of them was
+to say next; she did not look as though it even remotely concerned her.
+There were so many things that she might have said just now that Miss
+Pym could have taken up easily, but she did not say one of them, only
+exposed with indifference her profile to the sidelong, zealous research
+of Miss Pym. Her profile did not commit her, it expressed an ironic
+indulgence to fashion in the line of a hatbrim, the soft undulation of
+hair, an earring’s pendulous twinkle, the melting suave lines of a scarf
+round the throat. Mrs. Kerr took fashion in and subdued it and remained
+herself.
+
+Miss Pym with a welling-up in the depths of her, was moved to tell Mrs.
+Kerr everything and did not know where to begin. She was a timid woman
+but had for a moment the sufferer’s arrogance. She hesitated, pondered,
+debated with herself and again with reluctance looked back.
+
+It had been what she would have to describe as a quarrel. It had been a
+Moment, not a succession of moments, not a gradual divergence of herself
+and Emily from the path of loving forbearance. It had been a flare—or a
+blotting-out, how could she better describe it?—like the horrible
+blackness of spilt ink, suddenly everywhere, that makes one crinkle
+one’s face up. They had seen each other crudely illuminated, and they
+had seen each other as _vulgar_. She could not remember how it began,
+she could not remember anything leading up to it, just that there had
+been something intolerable about Emily from the moment she came to the
+door.... That is the worst of anger, that terrible clarity. They had
+had, at that moment when everything tottered, worse than a sense of
+destruction; they had felt the whole force of a doubt in that moment:
+had there ever been _anything_ there? Isolating doubt, which, coming
+upon them suddenly, had sent Miss Fitzgerald blindly downstairs and left
+Miss Pym, trembling, to put away the sketching-blocks and
+newly-sharpened pencils and empty the steaming coffee from the Thermos
+flask into the slop-pail.... If Miss Pym were to tell Mrs. Kerr all this
+she couldn’t imagine what Mrs. Kerr would be likely to say.
+
+She realized that she had not made any remark for a long time and
+wondered in agony what Mrs. Kerr must be thinking of her. A slight turn
+of Mrs. Kerr’s head, the ghost of a smile, the quickened shine of an
+earring made her feel all at once she _could_ not tell Mrs. Kerr: she
+was afraid.
+
+“I think many people might maintain,” began Miss Pym laboriously, “that
+this was an ideal place to pass the winter.”
+
+“I’m sure it is,” said Mrs. Kerr.
+
+“Except, of course, those _Spartans_ who enjoy the sleet and fogs, or
+say they do, because they maintain that endurance, that is, endurance
+practised as an act in itself, _constitutes_ enjoyment.”
+
+She had pulled out a fine, full stop of sarcasm, but Mrs. Kerr seemed to
+ignore it and said quite seriously: “Oh, but does anybody think that?”
+
+“I, I suppose they must,” said Miss Pym, flustered. “But I do think that
+to the Straightforward Person who can be frank with themselves and admit
+that they do like to escape the difficulties of Life and the
+unpleasantness—if they can do so without depriving themselves of
+Experience or evading Responsibilities, or hurting Other
+People—_then_....”
+
+Where was she, what had she been going to say? This was the way that she
+and Emily talked all day long, climbing the hills or sitting among those
+warm rocks that fringe the Mediterranean. They drew in each other’s
+ideas and gave out their own by a gentle process, like respiration. They
+had pinned down the most slippery ethical subtleties for absorbing,
+tireless analysis. Everything they said to each other was so _true_. Now
+this was all becoming nonsense, futile in the ears of Mrs. Kerr. Her
+waves came back bewildered, broken against something. She could not
+endure the ordeal of this gracious listening. Was Mrs. Kerr like this
+when Sydney Warren talked?
+
+She drew a desperate breath and continued, “As I say, to the
+Straightforward Person—and I think, you know, that the more one is that,
+the more one is bound to admit to oneself that one is a Hedonist, and
+that it is better not to fight or to drive oneself, but to lead and
+develop——”
+
+“Ah yes,” said Mrs. Kerr “I think you are so right. One’s first duty is,
+I’m sure, to be warm. Other people may pose about their reasons for not
+coming abroad, but you and I are much wiser.”
+
+The road ran straight ahead of them, parallel with the coast and planted
+with two regular lines of chestnut-trees. To the right the hills rose up
+with climbing villas, to the left the town with its gardens crowded down
+to the sea. As Miss Pym walked on, distressed but concentrated,
+confessing herself a Hedonist, Mrs. Kerr touched her lightly on the arm
+and said, “No, look; this way. We’re missing the turn to the
+tennis-club!” She kept a hand on Miss Pym’s sleeve for a moment longer
+and guided her gently. Their path struck off at a right angle between
+high garden walls, a funnel of sunshine so narrow that two could not
+walk abreast. Miss Pym, elated, deprecating, plunged down it ahead of
+her companion, who had to pause for a moment to disentangle her parasol
+from a long spray of creeper that swung down over a wall. Miss Pym felt
+the heat on her thin back as she hurried crabwise, incoherently talking,
+but she did not dare to put up her parasol because parasols are so
+awkward when one is nervous, and how should she feel if she poked Mrs.
+Kerr in the eye?
+
+She approached the tennis-courts and heard the cries, the ping of the
+balls, and saw the shining, darting figures and the shaded balconies of
+the pavilion. Miss Pym felt behind her a drawing-away of Mrs. Kerr and
+knew that she was now to be abandoned. Mrs. Kerr was looking through the
+wire netting, her eyes went from court to court, then turned
+dissatisfied to question the pavilion, then the benches underneath the
+wall where players sat in groups or couples, waiting for their courts.
+She watched these benches for some time, and Miss Pym watched her.
+
+“Well, it’s been so nice ...” said Mrs. Kerr. Her voice trailed off into
+a valedictory murmur. It had been so nice ... Miss Pym could never have
+brought herself near the tennis-courts, she was shy of all the people,
+she would never have come alone. They wore blazing, immaculate white and
+bright woolly wraps huddled round them professionally. The quality of
+their hard cool stare of indifference, yet so penetrating, was enhanced
+for Miss Pym by the glare of the courts, the air charged with sunshine,
+the treelessness, a kind of positiveness everywhere. She had a sense, so
+acute from her own ill-health as to become intolerable, of the
+stored-up, schooled, directed energy in all these fine bodies. She
+turned in a panic, abruptly, upon Mrs. Kerr. “I’ll be going back,” she
+said. “I——”
+
+The other stood still by the turnstile. Her eyes now rested in
+passivity, as after a home-coming, on a face they had discovered.
+
+“I’ll be going back....” Yes, it was Miss Warren who, over there with a
+scarlet handkerchief bound round her head, had been galvanized by
+awareness, half risen, and remained staring towards them over the
+courts. Miss Pym spoke again, louder, but Mrs. Kerr who was passing
+through the turnstile gave no sign of attention. Only when Miss Pym was
+half way up the path in retreat did Mrs. Kerr recollect her companion
+and, turning, make some vague gesture, some unheard sound of farewell.
+
+
+
+
+                                   II
+
+
+“But they told me you had come on down!” cried Sydney Warren. Slipping
+along the wall, at the edge of the courts, she gained the pavilion and
+the back upper bench where Mrs. Kerr had seated herself. Mrs. Kerr
+smiled and looked leisurely round her. From these high seats one had an
+excellent view of the courts and could hardly be seen from them, sitting
+far back in the shadow. At one’s feet a packed row of spectators leant
+forward into the sun.
+
+“I waited for nearly an hour,” said Sydney. “And Colonel Duperrier
+_swore_ he had seen you go down. I couldn’t make it out, but I came. If
+I’d ever imagined——”
+
+“It never occurred to me you would wait. It would have been dreadfully
+silly. And anyhow, it was nice to walk down with Colonel Duperrier.”
+(Sydney repudiated Colonel Duperrier with a grimace.) “I walked down
+with Miss Pym,” Mrs. Kerr said contentedly.
+
+“I know—I was horrified. One of the pussies!”
+
+“Oh, is she? She seemed intelligent. She was telling me she is a
+Hedonist.”
+
+“A _how_-much?”
+
+“A Hedonist.”
+
+“How Victorian!” Sydney said crossly, and hacked at the toe of her shoe
+with her racquet.
+
+“Do you think so,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I suppose,” she confessed, “one
+forgets: we _are_ rather old pussies.”
+
+“_Don’t_ be so——”
+
+“My dear child, I’m her age. We do date when we talk. She had
+quarrelled, I think, with her friend, the other artistic one. I came on
+her down in the lounge nearly crying and the other, still nearer it, was
+out in the road. You know, women’s lives _are_ sensational. Aren’t you
+inclined to be intolerant with us all?”
+
+Sydney seemed surprised at this quick little gush of humanity. She
+stared at her friend, who was brilliantly earnest, then turned away
+gloomily. “Oh, women’s _lives_....”
+
+“Well, I suppose it’s inconsistent of me,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I’m not a
+Feminist but I do like being a woman.”
+
+Any approach to the personal seemed to be difficult. Sydney said airily:
+“Oh, of course if one’s _one_ kind of woman——”
+
+“Well, so are you,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking abstractedly at her young
+friend. Sydney was probably twenty-two and had a clear pallor and
+regular features of which the lines were now, as too often, strained and
+broken up by an expression of over-eagerness. An exaggerated attention
+to what was being said or suggested would arch up the eyebrows
+tragically, harden the eyes and draw in the mouth to a line that
+prefigured maturity’s. The forehead was broad and lovely and could have
+been bland. The scarlet handkerchief bound round the head accentuated
+her darkness and pallor, it had in common with other details of her
+dress and appearance a faint kind of nervous swagger.
+
+“You could be charming,” said Mrs. Kerr. “But I daresay an indifference
+to one’s company which doesn’t comprehend the desire to please is really
+the safest.—Won’t you go and play tennis?”
+
+“I’m waiting for people in E Court to finish,” said Sydney and got up
+slowly, not quite knowing whether to resent this as a dismissal. Mrs.
+Kerr, with the air of a return to solitude, a cheerfulness faintly
+suggestive of release, leant forward and signalled to someone below who
+had been looking up for a long time, trying in vain to catch her eye.
+“Oh yes,” she replied, “do go and play tennis. Surely it wasn’t wise to
+come away from your partner when you were expecting a court?”
+
+“But what are you going to do?” asked Sydney. Mrs. Kerr did not answer.
+“I mean do you want me to go?” she began again. She did not want to
+leave the pavilion, this “girl of your age” tone which was being used to
+her really did give her something to resent. She did not want to go down
+to the courts again; she knew that if Mrs. Kerr sat on here, watching
+her meditatively, her play would all go to pieces.
+
+“I have heard so much of your service. To-day I am really going to watch
+it.”
+
+“This is one of my off days.”
+
+“Dear Sydney, whenever I come you tell me it’s one of your off days.”
+Mrs. Kerr laughed. “I’m unlucky.”
+
+“Oh, do you notice that? From the moment you come here I never hit
+anything.”
+
+“What on earth do you mean, my dear Sydney? How terribly sinister! It
+had never _occurred_ to me that my eyes might be evil. I meant something
+much more prosaic—that I happen to miss things.”
+
+Sydney felt foolish. How like her (Mrs. Kerr would agree) to have drawn
+so far-fetched, so morbid an inference. How unlike herself to have been
+betrayed into so bald an assertion.
+
+“Luck’s funny,” she said. “I don’t think it’s constantly good or bad,
+but it’s sun-y or moon-y, if you know what I mean, and one’s born with
+one kind or the other. Mine’s moon-y—I’d better go down.”
+
+“Yes, I shouldn’t have kept you.”
+
+Sydney played so badly that Colonel Duperrier was astonished. Now and
+then he permitted himself a “tut-tut”—by implication a tribute—an _Et
+tu, Brute_ at which she ironically chuckled. They crossed and recrossed
+one another grimly. Along the margin of her vision, distended by
+nervousness, shoulders were shrugged and disappointed onlookers strolled
+away. At a net that grew ever higher Colonel Duperrier’s opponent,
+Chinesely grinning, crouched and sprang incredibly. His partner a long
+way behind him nonchalantly flipped at her balls. Away at the back of
+the pavilion Mrs. Kerr remained sitting; the edge of her skirt, the tip
+of her parasol came out into sunlight. From out of the black shadow that
+hid the rest of her, her scrutiny like a fine wire was incessantly
+tugging at Sydney’s consciousness.
+
+The set was over, quickly over. Colonel Duperrier’s play had been
+affected by the collapse of his partner; now, as their opponents
+strolled off he laughed deprecatingly; stooping to let the balls run up
+on to his racquet. He had several pleasant remarks in reserve to brush
+away Sydney’s discomfiture, but some kind of apology from her was needed
+to unlock them; he did not know how to begin. She did not apologize and
+his embarrassment grew. No one could have been sorrier than he for the
+poor girl, a fine player subject to this deplorable kind of paralysis.
+He thanked God that he had not yet asked her to play with him in the
+tournament and resolved never to do so, yet he was filled with a
+special, protective benignancy for her.
+
+“Terrible glare,” said he.
+
+“There generally is.”
+
+“I thought, particularly bad to-day....”
+
+“I didn’t notice,” she said indifferently, wondering where to go now.
+Anywhere she thought, but back to the pavilion after all this.
+
+“We ought to move off,” he said, rousing her, “they want the court.
+Well, I vote we take those two on again and get some of our own back.
+Don’t we?”
+
+Though he continued to admire Miss Warren he could be no longer
+surprised that she was not popular in the Hotel. There was a certain
+dark stare of aloofness.... He told himself that she was curiously
+dammed-up; there was certainly something _in_ the girl. Generally
+speaking, he preferred people who came out easily: she was not his type.
+He came up abreast with her dutifully as they walked from the court,
+then his face brightened, he knew he would soon be relieved of her as
+Mrs. Kerr smiled and nodded down at them from the shade of the pavilion.
+“Come on up!” he said eagerly, and Sydney was forced to precede him.
+
+“We-ell?” said Mrs. Kerr, as though they had been a pair of victors.
+
+“The glare is awful,” said Colonel Duperrier.
+
+“I expect it is,” she agreed, and made room for them both. Colonel
+Duperrier cheered up, soon: in a quiet way that diffused itself across
+his features and attitude and the expression with which he watched the
+players below he became very cheerful indeed. When he had left them Mrs.
+Kerr asked Sydney to walk with her to the library. “Unless,” she said,
+“you are going to play again.”
+
+To go to the library one turned to the left instead of the right at the
+top of the footpath; the same procession of chestnut-trees arched one
+over with their boughs. At this hour the road was more frequented;
+lunch-time had made perceptible its earliest magnetism. Visitors
+strolled gravely hotelwards, and Villa Residents (proudly distinguished
+by the possession of dogs). There was no traffic and a long-legged
+English child in the middle of the road was able to read as she walked,
+without menace.
+
+“What a nice man, that Colonel Duperrier,” said Mrs. Kerr.
+
+“Yes. Very patient.”
+
+“_That_ seems a curious quality to attract you.”
+
+“Anyone else would have killed me this morning. I suppose he has learnt
+to be patient: that wife——”
+
+“Poor woman!”
+
+“It would be kinder if neurotics were to be chloroformed—did you admire
+my service?”
+
+“My dear child, don’t be heroic! I don’t remember it as anything
+terrible. I don’t know, of course, how well you can play.”
+
+Sydney was silent, stung by a sudden perception that Mrs. Kerr did not
+really believe in her tennis at all. If she did not exist for Mrs. Kerr
+as a tennis-player, in this most ordinary, popular of her aspects, had
+she reason to feel she existed at all? It became no longer a question
+of—what did Mrs. Kerr think of her? but rather—did Mrs. Kerr _ever_
+think of her? The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney
+that moment, a kind of extinction. Mrs. Kerr had many friends; all these
+demi-gods would leap up at a reference to one of the least of them,
+shadowy and menacing. Men and women of supreme distinction and beauty,
+they never appeared in person, were never described and so were never
+allowed to diminish. The very fact that Mrs. Kerr never praised them,
+seemed in fact rather flatly to take them for granted, was fresh reason
+for self-laceration. “A delightful woman ... rather a charming person
+... I thought, an amusing man....” These haunted Sydney, aloofly
+inimical, these friends of her friend. People one did not know remained
+on a different plane, inaccessible to one’s criticism. Sydney professed
+herself (to friends of her own age) a Realist, and it was perhaps
+because of this that her imagination which she dealt with austerely was
+able to revenge itself obliquely upon her.
+
+After a pause she said, “Well, you know one thing now about my play—if
+it interests you. You do know how bad it can be. I think that was the
+depths.”
+
+“Oh dear, oh dear,” her friend said benevolently. “—Will you kindly
+choose me another book?”
+
+“Did you finish that last?”
+
+Mrs. Kerr shook her head and looked sideways at Sydney in a way of her
+own. She sighed, her eyelids delicately and sadly fluttered—she was a
+lovely thing.
+
+“Oh,” said Sydney, in a secret ecstasy, “you are incorrigible! Then why
+do you go on asking me to choose you books?”
+
+“I know there must be something in them.” The way this was said might
+have stamped out of being, for Sydney, forever the friends of her
+friend. “I know, you see, there _has_ to be something. I want so much to
+be able to read them—I hope so much that I may.”
+
+“I shall give up choosing you books.”
+
+“Oh no, don’t do that ... Sydney darling. I suppose I _may_ be
+incorrigible. I still seem to read for amusement.”
+
+“But that was just it—I was so sure that man would amuse you. He’s got a
+brilliant mind like—like what would appeal to you.”
+
+“I’m sure he has. But you see he was much too clever for me so he only
+seemed to me dull. And I do still like books to be—what shall I
+say?—decent. Though I know it isn’t the thing to admit: you all have
+such pure minds.... I’m sorry.”
+
+“You don’t look a bit penitent. Tell me—has Ronald got a very pure
+mind?”
+
+“Alarmingly,” said Ronald’s mother, “but he’s learnt to respect my
+limitations.”
+
+Sydney, who was herself at times conscious of these
+limitations—remotely, as in a dream—smiled at the thought of Ronald, a
+long-limbed, intense-looking adolescent whom she was unlikely to meet.
+Ronald was a long way away, in Germany. (She had put together her Ronald
+from two photographs his mother possessed; a blurred snapshot and a
+shadowy portrait-study.) One could smile over Ronald; or imagine him as
+not distressing; he was not among the demi-gods. It was amusing to see
+one’s own qualities in him pilloried by tender maternal derision. Ronald
+was “young.” Yet all this might not have counted so much in his favour
+if it had not seemed certain that Ronald was to remain in Germany.
+
+“I should like to meet Ronald,” Sydney said benevolently. “And by the
+way,” she added, “I must bring back Tessa another book. Anything that’s
+bright and very loving, with a certain amount of illness in it will do
+her beautifully, provided she doesn’t remember having read it before—Now
+you’re not to say I’m horrid about Tessa: she’s as much amused at her
+own taste in books as I am. She hasn’t got much time for novels
+now—she’s reading Baudouin.”
+
+“It would never do,” said Mrs. Kerr, “to bring back Mrs. Bellamy one of
+your depressing books.” She slipped an arm through Sydney’s for a moment
+as they turned together up a flight of cold steps to the library.
+
+
+
+
+                                  III
+
+
+Tessa Bellamy did not feel so well again to-day and lay wishing more
+than ever that she knew what was the matter with her. Several complaints
+had, it is true, been suggested to her by her doctors before leaving
+England and she had come abroad with a perfectly open mind as to the
+possibility of most of them. Not one, however, had proved itself
+entirely satisfactory. She wanted something that would settle down with
+her, simple and unexigent like an old family servant, so that they might
+get to know each other and understand each other’s little ways. She was
+distressed by any suggestion of impermanence; she was a homely woman.
+One had to have Something in one’s life. She lay on a velvet sofa in her
+bedroom with the head pulled round away from the window and wished that
+she were a religious woman and that it were time for lunch and that
+Sydney would soon come in.
+
+Tessa had made a special arrangement with the management about dieting,
+if it should be necessary. She paid an extra 5% to have the menu for
+each meal brought up in advance; but so far she had liked the sound of
+everything so much and hated so much to give trouble that she had not
+asked for anything to be changed. She was not sure now whether she
+should continue the arrangement; by which, of course, one did deprive
+oneself of the pleasures of curiosity and suspense. On the other hand,
+the arrival of the menu gave one something to think about during the
+morning. She wished so much that she could make up her mind about this,
+turned her head among the cushions and with a sigh refolded her hands on
+her bosom. In Life one seemed always to be making decisions.
+
+When Sydney came in she thought that Tessa, lying with closed eyes in
+the thick green dusk of the closed jalousies, must be asleep. She stood
+looking down for a moment and pretended to herself (to heighten a sense
+of her real security) that Tessa was dead. She was fond of Tessa but
+imagination often divorces itself from feeling; all that occurred to her
+now was that in such a contingency she would have to leave Mrs. Kerr and
+the sunshine and go back to London because Tessa, whose guest she was
+here, would no longer be able to pay the bills. Later, however, she
+produced a real pang of distress—how her own irritability and coldness
+would glare back at her when Tessa was gone!
+
+Tessa put a hand up and patted her front hair, then, opening her eyes
+looked up at Sydney thoughtfully, not as one who has just been awakened.
+
+“I’ve been thinking things over—” she said.
+
+“Good!” exclaimed Sydney with the geniality that endeared her to Tessa.
+“If it’s the menu, you know, I should keep that up. It’s an excellent
+principle and I’m sure the manager respects you for it.”
+
+“Oh, do you think so?” said Tessa and looking up with round eyes thought
+how untrue it was that intellectual people did not make pleasant
+companions. “But you know I do hate——”
+
+“Giving trouble? But that’s what they’re paid for.... How are you
+feeling?” Sydney looked down with solicitude. To think one felt ill, to
+think only of that, to be so netted-down must be terrible....
+
+Tessa, drawing in her chin upon its many duplications, lay still and
+considered a moment, then began to tell Sydney exactly how she did feel.
+While she was still talking the gong sounded; she got up and patted her
+hair again, this time in front of the looking-glass. Breaking off with a
+sigh she began to powder her nose. Sydney meanwhile pushed open the
+jalousies, if she did not do this Tessa would quite contentedly make up
+her face in the half-light and go downstairs like a nice little clown.
+
+Sydney’s relations had been delighted that she should go abroad with her
+cousin Tessa. It had appeared an inspired solution of the Sydney
+problem. The girl passed too many of these examinations, was on the
+verge of a breakdown, and railed so bitterly at the prospect of a year’s
+enforced idleness that the breakdown seemed nearer than ever. Now an
+ideal winter had offered itself: sunshine, a pleasant social round.
+Sydney could be out of doors all day long; she might distinguish herself
+in tennis tournaments, she might get engaged. And Tessa was so kind; she
+was forty, married, motherly; she had no nerves, she had no children.
+Her inside kept her happy and interested, she would be the ideal
+companion for anybody inclined to be neurotic. She admired Sydney, whom
+she maintained to be cheerful and amusing; it would be good for Sydney
+to be with somebody who refused to consider her as anything but cheerful
+and amusing. Sydney seemed as a rule to be so unfortunate in her choice
+of friends.
+
+Sydney untied the red handkerchief and combed back the hair from her
+forehead. She frowned at her own reflection: was this what all these
+people really saw when they looked at her? She was accustomed to stare
+at people as from a point of vantage, forgetting she too had a face.
+They had thoughts too (with these she often forgot to credit them). Did
+_they_ also think as they looked at oneself? The strangeness is that a
+cat can look at a king and _see_ him; we kings forget so often that cats
+are more than objective.
+
+“—a lucky girl you are,” Tessa was remarking, “to be able to walk about
+like that in the sun without burning your face.—We’re to have an
+asparagus omelette, Sydney: you know, _à l’Asperge_! We might come on
+down, if you’re ready: they bring in the omelettes at once and it really
+isn’t fair to the waiters....”
+
+Very few people cared as much as this about being fair to the waiters;
+the others came trickling into the dining-room gradually, by twos and
+threes. The table Tessa had secured for herself was in a good position,
+near the door but not too far away from a window. By turning her head a
+little Sydney could feel the cool air on her face and see, under the
+awning, palm-fronds rising up from the garden below, an orange tree in
+fruit and the roofs of the town behind it, vivid against the sea. Mrs.
+Kerr’s table was off to the right at such an angle from where they sat
+that, without being too much observed, Sydney was able to watch it. It
+was generally empty the longest of all. Behind Tessa the double doors
+were spread wide in a hospitable gesture, like the hands of a maître
+d’hôtel. Beyond, down the long prospective to the foot of the stairs one
+could see visitors take form with blank faces, then compose and poise
+themselves for an entrance. Those who thought punctuality rather
+suburban would gaze into the unfilled immensity of the room for a moment
+then vanish repelled. Others would advance swimmingly and talk from
+table to table across the emptiness, familiarly, like a party of
+pioneers. Men came in without their wives and did not always look up
+when these entered. Women appearing before their husbands remained
+alert, gazed into an opposite space resentfully and ate with an air of
+temporizing, off the tips of their forks. When the husbands did come in
+it seemed a long time before there was something to say. It seemed odder
+than ever to Sydney, eyeing these couples, that men and women should be
+expected to pair off for life.
+
+During intervals between the courses women reft from intimate
+conversation looked across at each other’s tables yearningly. Mrs.
+Hillier held out by the fringe for a friend’s admiration a beautiful
+crêpe-de-chine scarf she had bought in the shops. She had chosen it for
+a wedding present but it was such a lovely green that she could not
+resist wearing it, just till this evening, to take out the creases. The
+three pretty daughters of a London doctor at a table in one of the
+windows maintained their high level of uproariousness. They were the
+first to be interrupted by Mr. Lee-Mittison, who was going a round of
+the tables with an open botany case. He showed them the roots of a very
+uncommon anemone, found in the hills. The three Lawrences turned their
+shining heads to wrinkle up their noses at the botany case, but Mr.
+Lee-Mittison was not to be discouraged. He dangled one of the roots at
+them; his teeth and his glasses glittered benevolently.
+
+“My wife and I,” he said, “hope to make another expedition to the hills
+to-morrow, taking with us provisions for a picnic. We shall be delighted
+for you three young ladies to accompany us.” He rested a hand on
+Veronica Lawrence’s chair and beamed down on the top of her head. The
+Lawrences made round eyes at each other and tittered unabashedly. Their
+father, to show that he was in no way responsible for them, leaned back
+and looked out of the window. “There is a special invitation,” continued
+their friend, “for Miss Veronica, whom I know to be an excellent
+walker.” He clicked the lid of the botany case, winked respectfully at
+Veronica and passed on to another table.
+
+The Lawrences had appropriated for general use the principal young man
+of the Hotel, young Mr. Ammering; who having been unable to find a job
+since the War was said to be suffering from nervous depression in
+consequence and had come out here for a rest with his father and mother.
+He seemed to be one of those young men of thirty (Public School and
+University education, active, keen sportsman, good general capacities)
+who advertize their willingness to try anything in the personal column
+of _The Times_. Enforced inactivity must come very hard on poor Mr.
+Ammering, who played tennis all day long with a set face and went out at
+nights with the Lawrences to dances at other hotels, where he talked to
+his partners most beautifully about the War.
+
+Mr. Lee-Mittison after a moment’s pause—not diffident, only embarrassed
+by the richness of his acquaintanceship—veered left towards the
+Ammerings’ table. But Victor as he approached took up the local paper
+and began to read the visitors’ list aloud to his parents, who listened
+attentively. The nearer Mr. Lee-Mittison came the louder Victor read and
+the more eagerly his parents listened. Something about the group of
+them, rather too exclusively domestic, offended Mr. Lee-Mittison’s
+social sense vaguely: he turned away. The Ammerings should not see his
+anemones. He paused for a word with Mrs. Hillier who shook out the
+fringe of her scarf at him, seeming delighted to talk, and decided to
+cut out a visit to the Mellarshes who, quite newly married, were though
+not talkative still solicitously watching one another eat.
+
+The Honourable Mrs. Pinkerton and her sister-in-law the Honourable Miss
+Pinkerton had professed to be interested in anemones: they had an
+extremely fine garden at home which Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison hoped to
+visit. But though the two families were on excellent terms, in fact
+becoming quite intimate, Mr. Lee-Mittison still did not like to approach
+the good ladies at meal-time. They seemed somehow enclosed as they sat
+there, moated about by their patent honourableness. Distinction drew a
+bright line round their woolly white heads, detaching them from the
+panorama of faces, distinction flowed down with their sleek satin
+draperies into dark folds. Bowing towards their placid obliviousness,
+Mr. Lee-Mittison passed on.
+
+Sydney’s eye went over Tessa’s shoulder, fixing the doorway; Tessa’s
+little smiles at her withered unnoticed.
+
+“Hasn’t Mrs. Kerr come in yet?” said Tessa at last, her penetration
+innocently revenging the death of the smiles. “How vague she is! I’m
+afraid she will miss the omelette.”
+
+“She doesn’t like omelettes,” said Sydney, looking solemnly at Tessa
+with her strained dark eyes. She could have screamed when Mr.
+Lee-Mittison, coming up unheard behind her, laid a hand on the back of
+her chair. Putting down the case on the table he showed them his roots.
+He liked Tessa to whom he had talked a great deal, but it was to Sydney
+that his invitation was to be addressed. “My wife and I—” he began, and
+glanced again at Tessa, regretfully. She was not young enough ...
+“—provisions for a picnic,” he concluded.
+
+“When?” said Sydney abruptly.
+
+He flipped the air with his hand to enjoin patience. “I was about to
+say: we shall be glad if you will join us to-morrow——”
+
+“Oh, thank you, I can’t. I am sorry, I have an engagement.”
+
+“_O-oh!_” said Tessa, who thought this would have been nice for Sydney;
+while Mr. Lee-Mittison stared incredulously.
+
+“Tut-_tut_!” he said. “Well, think it over....” Sydney’s strangeness
+bothered him; the Lawrences had seemed so _glad_. From behind a screen
+that hid the service-lift the waiters with their steaming dishes
+debouched suddenly and sped like bees to distribute themselves among the
+tables. Excusing himself quickly Mr. Lee-Mittison hurried back to his
+own table where his wife who rejoiced in Herbert’s popularity had sat
+all this time knitting. Now she leant sideways and pulled his chair
+further out for him, tucked her knitting away in a bag and gave him all
+her attention. The return was in the nature of a home-coming; she was
+the kind of wife who can always create this atmosphere. “Well?” said
+she.
+
+Behind Tessa the doorway still framed emptiness. The meal clattered on.
+Nearly everybody here was English: the air was allowed to come in
+pleasantly through the open windows under green-striped awnings and feel
+its way cool-fingered from flushing face to face. Nobody was hurried or
+constrained, time put out no compulsion and the afternoon might have
+stretched ahead, as it seemed to stretch, brightly blank. Over it,
+however, habit had spun her web of obligations; a web infinitely fine
+and fragile from which it was yet impossible to break without outrage.
+Beyond the dining-room along the expanses of the lounge people risen
+early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek beneath the rule
+of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements. Leisure, so linked
+up with ennui, had been sedulously barred away. Each armchair, each palm
+and bureau had become a trysting place where couples met to hurry off or
+groups were reunited.
+
+Meeting with an air of effort, that made her seem to be breasting a
+current, the desultory trickle of the exodus, Miss Pym came in, very
+late. She was scarlet-eyed, the last tear must have been recently wiped
+away. Something wobbled in her throat, round which she twisted and
+untwisted an anæmic string of turquoise beads. She seemed constrained to
+look at everybody, then to look quickly away again. Sydney, leaning her
+cheek on her hand turned from the door for a minute or two to study Miss
+Pym. She had never seen what she still called to herself a “grown-up
+person” so visibly ravaged by emotion. The emotional range of her elders
+seemed to Sydney narrow and stereotyped; they reacted without variation
+to stimuli from without. But Miss Pym gave an impression, somehow, of
+having been attacked from _within_.
+
+Miss Pym looked diffidently at the waiter. She had cut herself off from
+the omelette so he shrugged his shoulders and brought her up a plate of
+macaroni from the servants’ lunch. This the bruised creature pitifully
+but with evidence of hunger began to devour; the traditional British
+struggle with macaroni brought her sharply down from tragedy to farce.
+Sydney sighed impatiently and turned away.
+
+Mrs. Kerr, half way across the dining-room, looked about her in
+surprise. Discounting her own lateness she seemed to wonder if the other
+visitors had been dispersed miraculously. Her eyebrows said “How odd!”
+but did not seem to ponder over this. She sat down and looked out at the
+orange tree; then took up her Tauchnitz and without another glance at
+the room began to read.
+
+Tessa and Sydney had been sitting on interminably; they had watched from
+rise to fall of the curtain the whole drama of lunch. The fact was,
+Tessa did not think it was wise to hurry. She turned round and round
+pensively their basket of fruit, took each orange up, pinched it and put
+it back again. The nicest-looking were never the softest: another of
+Life’s perplexities.
+
+“I think,” she said at last, “that I _will_ take another orange but I
+won’t eat it here. I shall take it up to my room with me and eat it
+there. I’m quite sure, you know, that oranges are _good_.... But don’t
+let me keep you, Sydney, if you want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr.”
+
+“Why should I want to go and talk to Mrs. Kerr?” asked Sydney in an
+unconcerned voice that echoed round the big, deserted, crumby
+orange-scented dining-room.
+
+
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+
+The Honourable Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton occupied two wide-balconied rooms
+at the end of the first-floor corridor. Five times across the Hotel,
+each on a floor, these corridors ran, dark, thickly carpeted, panelled
+with bedroom doors. The front rooms looked over the town into dazzling
+spaciousness, sky and sea; the back rooms were smaller, never so bright,
+and looked over the road with its chestnut-trees into the side of the
+hill. Into these the north light came slanting; no sky was visible until
+one leant far out, only the scrambling olives and scared little faces of
+the villas. Eyes from the villas could have peered down into the vacant
+eyes of newly-awakened sleepers. At this side of the Hotel, screened by
+opaque glass from the possibility of such observation, were the
+bathrooms.
+
+Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton were of course on the sunny side, with their
+balconies from which the view could be patronized. The view was their
+own; they were to enjoy the spiritual, crude and half-repellent beauty
+of that changing curtain, so featureless save for the occasional passing
+of a ship. They barricaded themselves in from the assault of noonday
+behind impassable jalousies. No private suite with a bathroom was
+available; it was possible, they brought themselves to comprehend dimly,
+that in Hotels of this type none existed. They therefore had had
+reserved, at some expense, the bathroom opposite to their doors for
+their own exclusive occupation. One says “occupation” advisedly: here in
+white-tiled sanctuary their bowls of soap, their loofahs, their scented
+bath-salts could remain secure from outrage; here too their maid could
+do their smaller washing and hang the garments up to dry before the
+radiator. There generally were garments drying there; the two distrusted
+foreign laundresses, perhaps with reason.
+
+Other visitors on the first floor respected this arrangement which had a
+certain beauty for them, the accretion of prestige. They bathed at the
+other end of the corridor; if that bathroom was full they went up to the
+second floor where people could not afford to have baths so often. James
+Milton, a clergyman, was however unaware of this, and going upstairs
+directly after his arrival locked himself into Miss Pinkerton’s
+bathroom. Here he hoped to remove by steaming and by prolonged immersion
+the grime, ingrained in one till one is almost polished, of a
+transcontinental journey. This was the bath that he had been promising
+himself for the last thirty-six hours: it had come to shine before his
+numbing intelligence as in itself the journey’s bourne. He did not
+notice the bath-salts but unthinkingly made full use of the loofah,
+which he was surprised and pleased to find there.
+
+He had arrived late, having dined on the train, and few people were at
+hand to witness the arrival: a big man talking Italian above the folds
+of a muffler and making abundant, baulked gestures at the boots and
+concierge. He seemed unwilling to admit how well they could speak
+English. The few onlookers, by hanging poised in their talk for an
+infinitesimal second’s observation, bore in a sense of his squalor upon
+him sharply. He was aware of the glow of clean faces, the glaze of
+immaculate shirt-fronts. He felt them avert their eyes considerately.
+Relegated, alien, blinking like an owl after his long dark drive in the
+light’s untempered scrutiny he stood for a moment, then fled upstairs on
+the way to Mrs. Pinkerton’s bathroom.
+
+He took in enough of his No. 19, when the chambermaid switched the
+lights up, to know that it faced out the wrong side, offered no space
+for his baggage and was so furnished as to confuse thought, distract
+contemplation and impede the movements of the body. The lace-veiled
+window was pallid against the dark; pushing it open a little he let in
+some cold air and heard the rustle of a palm-tree. Unwinding his muffler
+and throwing off his great coat he waited only to take out his
+sponge-bag and dressing-gown and sweep his towels along with him; then
+made off down the corridor calling back to the chambermaid in three
+languages that he was going to have a bath. He was an independent man
+with a bump of locality on which he had grown with years increasingly
+reliant, and he brought himself without difficulty to the door of a
+hospitable-looking bathroom.
+
+Mrs. Pinkerton and her sister-in-law never sat for more than a minute or
+two in the drawing-room where other ladies foregathered. They withdrew
+early to their own rooms, where they would embroider, eat little
+pastries and drink coffee. No one else had ever been invited to join
+them there; such an invitation was hardly to be expected; though the
+Pinkertons had consented to be present once or twice at Mrs.
+Lee-Mittison’s coffee parties. They felt, perhaps, a little lonely these
+evenings, the comfortable feeling of enclosedness would fall away when
+there was nobody to be enclosed against. In the high room, among
+marble-topped furniture, they sat listening with well-bred attentiveness
+to one another’s breathing. Through the thin walls every foot-step,
+every shutting of a door should have been audible in the velvety silence
+of the corridor. Yet the ladies had this evening no inkling of what was
+to occur; no premonition seems to have troubled them.
+
+The Honourable Edward Pinkerton had died before his father, Lord Parke.
+Though he had not been young when he died such a frustration of life’s
+high purpose for him—he was an only son—had lent him the pathos of
+youth. Had his widow been less substantial and less palpably recent he
+might have passed, by the references to him, as having died before his
+majority. He remained “Poor Edward,” embalmed like a dead child in the
+pity and patronage of the living. He was making a third with them, this
+evening as ever, his mild, be-whiskered face, with that expression of
+awe on it with which fancy is wont to invest the pictured faces of the
+dead, looked out from a vast scrolled frame that over-shadowed the
+silver-stoppered bottles on the dressing-table. A similar photograph
+commanded the bedroom of Rosina, his sister to the exclusion of other
+relationships. Rosina sat in an armchair pulled out under the light with
+her work held up to her eyes, embroidering diligently. She and her
+sister-in-law had grown very like one another, coiffured and dressed by
+the same hands, worked upon from within by similar preoccupations. They
+were more closely allied to one another in the memory of Edward than
+they had either of them been to Edward himself. Somehow, up to the
+moment of death, Edward had eluded both of them; it was after death they
+had closed in on him relentlessly. Cherished little animosities
+reinforced their ties to one another; Rosina maintained to herself
+implacably that if she had been Edward’s wife she would have borne him
+children; while Louisa was enough aware of this to be a little markedly
+generous to Rosina, who was not in a position to refuse anything that
+might be offered.
+
+Mrs. Pinkerton sat turning over the pages of the _Tatler_ and talking to
+Rosina while she embroidered.
+
+“I see,” she said, “the Wyntons’ girl is to be married.”
+
+“Ah?” remarked Rosina, snipping with her gilt scissors. “Who is he?”
+
+“A _Barre_, apparently.”
+
+“Are there Barres? I never heard of any. Where does it say he comes
+from?”
+
+“It says here,” replied her sister-in-law, looking at the paper closely,
+“Hampshire.”
+
+“There are no Barres in Hampshire,” said Rosina definitely.
+
+“Then it is another of these marriages.” They both sighed.
+
+“Elissa Howard,” Mrs. Pinkerton went on more cheerfully, “with a very
+pleasant, cheerful letter. She is so considerate when one is abroad, or
+ill. She is a woman that I always like to hear from. She is coming out
+next month, to Nice, you know.”
+
+“It will be pleasant to have Elissa within reach. One feels very
+isolated.”
+
+“Oh, I’m sorry, Rosina, that you don’t _like_ the Hotel.... I cannot
+understand how anyone can go to Nice: they say it is a kind of French
+Brighton.”
+
+“They say the Carnival is very pretty.... But I daresay,” Rosina
+unguardedly added, “that it’s more expensive than we——”
+
+“It’s not a question—” Mrs. Pinkerton was beginning. “_Come_ in!” she
+cried in an exasperated voice. Lurgan, the maid, put her long wedge of a
+face round the door.
+
+“I beg your pardon, Madam, I’m sure,” she said, “but I put the Shetlands
+to air an hour ago and now I cannot get into the bathroom....”
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three or four minutes after this announcement Tessa, thoughtfully taking
+her hair down with Baudouin propped up before her, was surprised by the
+entrance of Sydney, unusually animated.
+
+“Mrs. Pinkerton and Rosina,” said Sydney, “cannot get into their
+bathroom. They simply can’t. I’ve been watching. Both their doors are
+open and they take it in turns to come and rattle incredulously at the
+bathroom door. It is really funny; I wish you would peep out and look.
+That determined little rat of a maid of theirs is being the man of the
+party; she heaved her shoulder against the door just now as though she
+were going to force it and Rosina cried ‘No, don’t, I forbid you—there
+may be somebody there!’”
+
+“Oh poor things!” said Tessa. “How awkward for them. Do you think they
+will send for the manager?”
+
+Tessa with her fluffy hair falling down round the innocent,
+interrogatory O of her face looked younger, looked really rather—there
+was no other word for it—sweet. She wrapped her kimono closer round her
+and followed Sydney into the dusk of their end of the corridor, from
+whence they expected to watch unobserved. But a moment later Miss
+Pinkerton, down at the other end, turned in their direction a wild face
+of appeal. She hesitated, then something in the essential Tessa brought
+her towards them. She ignored Tessa’s _déshabille_. “Oh, Mrs. Bellamy,”
+she began, “I wonder if you.... It is rather embarrassing....”
+
+“I _know_. I am so sorry. Have you any idea?”
+
+“We cannot understand,” said Miss Pinkerton. “We _cannot_ believe——”
+
+“It can’t be deliberate,” said Tessa consolingly.
+
+“Why don’t you ring for the manager?” asked Sydney, anxious to
+precipitate a crisis.
+
+“I think it would be better for us, under the circumstances, to send for
+Madame.”
+
+“But it may be a man.”
+
+“It cannot be a _gentleman_....”
+
+Mrs. Pinkerton appeared at the door of her bedroom. She looked
+expressionlessly out from under an Olympic cloud of hair and seemed
+immense. She said: “My sister may have told you of our difficulty?”
+
+“You’ve _no_ idea?” Tessa said again, hopefully.
+
+Mrs. Pinkerton shook her head. “One doesn’t like to be seen standing
+here,” she said, and, an invitation seeming to be implicit, they
+followed her back into her room. They must have been the first in the
+Hotel to cross that threshold, it was a tribute to the humanity of
+Tessa. Keeping the door a little open they listened and heard the
+uninterrupted crash of water from two taps turned full on. Sydney
+covertly pulled the “_Tatler_” towards her and glanced at its pages but
+the stricken air of the two ladies pervaded the room and began to
+oppress her. She realized that this must be something worse for them
+than not, simply, getting what they paid for. It went deeper than that.
+They were stupid but not, she felt, vulgar; all this lace and leather,
+monograms everywhere and massive encrustations of silver meant less to
+them, probably, than to herself to whom wealth and position would have
+been conveniences to be made use of. They were part of the immense
+assumption on which the Pinkertons based their lives. The Pinkertons
+imposed themselves on the world by conviction. The damage at which they
+now stood aghast was not a personal affront and they were ennobled by
+the absence of personal resentment. The poor old things had, after all,
+ventured out into the world along a kind of promontory.
+
+Lurgan came in and stood by the door. “You would ’ave thought,” said
+she, “that ’e would at least ’ave noticed Madame’s Shetlands, ’anging by
+the radiator.”
+
+“I don’t see why you should assume that it’s——”
+
+“’Ark!” said Lurgan putting up a hand peremptorily.
+
+The taps had been turned off and a fine baritone voice rose clear at the
+cessation of the water. “Hail, gladdening Light,” ... it sang; an
+evening hymn.
+
+“Singing!” said Lurgan. It was inexpressible.
+
+“It’s a lovely hymn,” Tessa said, propitiatory. Her face lighted up, and
+she looked round at them. “I expect,” she said, “it’s the clergyman.
+There was that Mr. Milton....”
+
+“One would have expected greater delicacy,” said Mrs. Pinkerton and
+indeed on that score Tessa did feel Milton to be indefensible. The
+testimony of the radiator.... She looked helplessly at Sydney who,
+overcome at the moment by a simultaneous desire to yawn and to laugh,
+suggested that they should go back to their rooms—since there seemed
+nothing at all to be done—and leave the Pinkertons and Lurgan to their
+vigil.
+
+“One could take steps ...” Mrs. Pinkerton was saying, frozen into an
+attitude of reflection.
+
+“Or would you wait till to-morrow to do so, and just let him finish his
+hymn now and come out.”
+
+“There are situations in life,” said Mrs. Pinkerton, “face to face with
+which one is powerless.” Though she only meant that in the struggle for
+life one is sorely handicapped by the obligations of nobility, Tessa and
+Sydney gathered that Mrs. Pinkerton was prostrated. After a blank little
+silence intended to express the inexpressible they murmured a solicitous
+“Good-night” and slipped through the door.
+
+James Milton met them coming out. The asceticism of a life time in such
+matters had drawn him after ten minutes out of his bath. He had stood
+and steamed in the warm air, then scrubbed himself dry and got into his
+dressing-gown sooner than he had expected. The water now receding from a
+rich black rim along the sides of the bath had done its work, he felt
+his own man again, clear-brained and vigorous. He looked forward to
+stretching out his limbs in a bed again—cramped by last night in the
+train—when once he had unpacked and been able to come to terms with his
+ridiculous room. He hoped to sleep till the palm-trees outside were
+posed in blue air and white sunshine; when on opening his eyes a first
+picture should spring to them brilliantly, vivid, as he leaned from his
+window, with all the vividness of ideality. He still had a childish
+pleasure in arriving at places at night, as though he had been brought
+there blindfold. Humming a Gregorian chant he clicked back the bolt
+sharply and came face to face with two ladies, one in a dressing-gown,
+emerging simultaneously from an opposite room.
+
+Tessa, horrified, fled down the corridor, they heard her door slam.
+Sydney stared. She did not see why she should retreat, as she
+momentarily expected Milton to do so, and she could not help being
+amused at his discomfiture. Milton looked boiled, his face, neck and
+ears were bright scarlet; his fine thin hair stood erect and his damp
+moustache drooped at the ends like a sea-lion’s. He clasped his clothes
+and towels against him in an ungainly bundle.
+
+Milton also stared; it did not occur to him to retreat and there seemed
+to be nowhere to go to. He felt quite sure he had met Sydney before. Her
+dark eyebrows, square forehead and arrogant chin seemed already
+familiar. On this evening of strangeness and new impressions she was out
+of place, stepping out as she did from among his own recollections.
+Unaware of himself he bowed gravely, while in the doorway behind her
+horrified faces appeared for the moment, then vanished again.
+
+
+
+
+                                   V
+
+
+The party for Mr. Lee-Mittison’s expedition was assembling as directed
+in the lounge, at the foot of the stairs. They stood in a group, eyeing
+one another a little blankly. Veronica Lawrence came downstairs,
+twisting her scarf round her throat nonchalantly and pulling down her
+felt hat over her eyes. Mr. Lee-Mittison clicked the lid of his watch at
+her playfully.
+
+“Oh, sorry!” cried Veronica. “Am I keeping you all?”
+
+Victor Ammering heaved himself out of an armchair and came sauntering
+up, hunched and indecisive-looking, ruffled about the head like a young
+thrush. He stood tugging at the flaps of his pockets, and Mrs.
+Lee-Mittison hurrying to and fro in a last ecstasy of preparation
+stumbled over his feet.
+
+Mr. Lee-Mittison, his Panama hat in his hand, was counting heads, making
+quick calculations, and checking over the parcels of lunch on the
+concierge’s desk. He called to his wife, who was advising everybody to
+take some kind of an alpenstock in case of difficult walking, “Now, are
+we all complete? Is there anyone else? I believe they’ve put out one too
+many packets of lunch.”
+
+“Better than one too few,” observed one of the girls, and the rest
+laughed politely.
+
+“Three-five-six-eight—No, there is no one to come, they have made a
+mistake. Now, Herbert, the girls are all ready, I think.”
+
+“Then forward—march!” cried Mr. Lee-Mittison and the five girls followed
+by Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison filed through the swing-door held back by
+James Milton, who brought up the rear. Glancing back through the glass
+he saw Victor, whose rather marked exclusion from the picnic-party he
+was at a loss to account for, pocket the remaining parcel of sandwiches.
+This was done calmly and not with the air of a sudden resolve. Mr.
+Milton puzzled, alert for experience, hurried after the others.
+
+They went forward at a swinging pace, well spread out across the middle
+of the road. Carriages jingled past them and a motor rushed by
+containing Colonel and Mrs. Duperrier and Mrs. Kerr who were driving
+over the frontier to visit some friends. They all waved and smiled at
+Mr. Lee-Mittison’s party. This was a moment of keen pleasure for the
+Lee-Mittisons. _She_ carried a mackintosh over her arm in contempt of
+the sky, a bag of knitting in case they should sit down for long and a
+basket of delicacies, dates and chocolates, with which Herbert liked her
+to supplement the lunch. Under her hard hat she shone with happiness;
+she refused to allow Mr. Milton to carry the basket.
+
+“Oh no, please,” she implored “it’s _our_ picnic!” and he saw that her
+day would be spoilt if she were not able to be the Martha.
+
+Mr. Lee-Mittison was pleased with his wife, as with everybody, and now
+and then patted affectionately the folds of her mackintosh. The
+departure, always a fidgety piece of organization, had gone off
+magnificently with never a hitch, and he looked with satisfaction at the
+five girls with their short skirts and neat ankles walking in front of
+him. No one could have been less of a horrid old satyr than Mr.
+Lee-Mittison but he loved to surround himself with bright faces and the
+faces of young women are admittedly the brightest.
+
+He knew himself to be a success with young people: he could spin yarns
+and imitate animals by the hour, and tell graphically of life in the
+East, bearing his descriptions out with photograph albums. He found that
+he need never want for young society; girls seemed to take to him
+naturally. He did not care for young married women, while widows
+depressed him—poor little souls. On this occasion, the capitulation of
+Sydney Warren had been a particular triumph. She walked before him with
+her characteristic quick step, a little out of time with the others; her
+hands pushed deep down into the pockets of her jersey. It was true that
+in the glimpse he had had of her face she had not looked merry, and that
+her back now did little to correct that impression. But if so, Mr.
+Lee-Mittison thought, a jolly day in the hills would be all the better
+for her.
+
+The five girls had been all rather silent, but suddenly Eileen Lawrence
+burst into song: a chant in time with their marching:
+
+   “‘I had a good home that I lèft—lèft—lèft
+     Now don’t you think I was rìght—rìght—rìght
+   Me father was drunk so I packed up me trunk
+     And I lèft—lèft—lèft—’
+
+Oh, get into step, Sydney!”
+
+“Really, Eileen!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, smiling with gratification at
+this burst of high spirits but glancing up at the villa windows under
+which they were still passing. The Lawrences were such dear girls,
+Herbert loved them so, but she did hope they were not going to be too
+rowdy.
+
+“This feels like school again,” said Eileen, “left—left—left——”
+
+“I can’t think what one would do,” observed Veronica, “if one’s father
+really were drunk.”
+
+“Doctors daren’t——”
+
+Two other girls, a pair of pale Miss Bransomes, giggled ecstatically.
+
+“Specially Dad,” continued Eileen. “But as far as I know Dad’s never
+killed anybody.”
+
+“Oh _Eileen_!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
+
+“I daresay,” said Veronica, “that if we pretended to everybody here that
+Dad did drink everybody here would believe us. They’re a cheery crowd.”
+
+“Not a very _kind_ joke, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, pink with
+diffidence.
+
+James Milton, in whose late parish most of the people had been elderly,
+looked with interest at these modern girls. Sydney, turning round
+suddenly, caught him watching them all with pleased curiosity and felt
+as his eye lingered hopefully on her that he was expecting a further
+contribution, still more characteristic, from herself. She was silent
+sardonically, partly to disappoint him, partly because she never felt in
+tune with the Lawrences and partly because she was self-conscious and
+felt stiff and clumsy at this sort of ragging.
+
+Mr. Milton had been introduced to them all in the lounge by Mr.
+Lee-Mittison, who commended him to their good graces with a general wave
+of his hand. The Lee-Mittisons always went out of their way to be
+pleasant to strangers, making efforts to draw them as soon as possible
+into the social life of the Hotel centering round Mr. Lee-Mittison. They
+had been predisposed in Milton’s favour by the fact that he had come
+downstairs to breakfast and ordered an egg; this seemed to them virile.
+Very few people came down to breakfast, a discouraging meal to which the
+Lee-Mittisons by a punctual appearance and bright nods round tried in
+vain to impart an atmosphere. Accordingly they had button-holed Milton
+and told him that he positively must join their expedition this morning,
+they would take no denial. Milton looked flattered and bothered. “As
+jolly a set of girls as you’ll meet anywhere,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison,
+winking chastely.
+
+Milton was a big man of about forty-three with the clear,
+ruddy-and-white complexion of a wax model from which the moustache and
+expressive mouse-coloured eyebrows sprouted unconvincingly, looking
+darker than they were. He was long-limbed and strongly built but
+evidently out of training, for he began to pant and be silent sooner
+than any of them when they took the steep path up the side of the hill.
+He had intelligent, bright eyes creased at the corners with humour and
+the assured, affable, occasionally rather inane manner of the innately
+shy and diffident man who has never had to venture outside a society
+where he is secure and appreciated, and who has brought himself to
+believe in spite of a deep-down protest that such a society is the
+world. One felt that it should be easy to impress, affect or discompose
+Mr. Milton and yet that he had seldom been impressed, affected or
+discomposed.
+
+The path was cobbled, it went up glaring white beyond the edge of one’s
+vision, relieved only here and there by the shadow of an olive-tree.
+After some time it intersected a road that ran high up along the ends of
+the hill, and the party staggered a short way along the road and sat
+breathlessly down on the parapet. James Milton and the Lawrences took
+out their cigarette-cases and Milton offered his round.
+
+“Oh you girls, you girls!” cried Mr. Lee-Mittison. “You do it
+charmingly, but how I wish that you wouldn’t!”
+
+Sydney merely bent forward to the flame of a match that Milton was
+sheltering for her but the Bransomes, a pair of pale cousins, turned
+paler still with dismay. They had recently arrived and had been much
+gratified by an invitation to the picnic; they did not care if they
+smoked or not, having only wished to resemble as closely as possible the
+Lawrences and the alarming Miss Warren. They waved the cigarettes away
+and shook their heads mulishly.
+
+Mr. Lee-Mittison ignored their sacrifice. He was sitting astride on the
+parapet facing his protégées, and he leant forward, extending and
+thumping his chest. “Look at me!” he shouted. “Sixty-four and never
+smoked, never touched a drop in my life. Sixty-four, I tell you.” He
+stuck out his chest still further and invited one of the Bransomes to
+thump it also, but she declined. “Regular habits, the fear of God, and
+water from the spring!”
+
+“—Perrier when we are abroad!” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, knitting.
+
+The olives below the parapet sighed and twinkled; between the branches
+the party looked down at the miniature roofs of the town and realized
+how far they had come. Little distinct shadows from branches above their
+heads shivered over their figures and faces. Veronica moved closer up to
+Sydney confidentially. She thought Sydney queer, rather interesting and
+wondered what she could possibly be thinking so hard about all the time.
+Sydney’s remoteness intrigued the fêted Veronica. She supposed with
+sincere generosity that the sort of men who did not admire herself might
+find Sydney very attractive. The absence of such a man here seemed bad
+luck on Sydney. But then, on the other hand, Sydney had curious ties.
+
+“I never thought he’d get _you_,” said Veronica. “You always seem to be
+doing something else.” She placed a foot of her own beside a foot of
+Sydney’s and noted that while Sydney’s was the better shaped her own
+must be by half a size the smaller. “You seem to be wonderfully busy,”
+she said with a sigh.
+
+Sydney glanced into the irreverent, sentimental boy’s-eyes of Veronica.
+There _was_ something pleasantly hard about her; at every contact one
+was conscious of the blade in her, deep down, with an edge to it.
+
+“Constant dripping,” she said. “For twenty-four hours I seemed to meet
+no one but Mr. Lee-Mittison and every time we met he was so _sure_.—I
+wonder if _she_, or the first wife, ever wanted to marry him, or whether
+they _had_ to....”
+
+“How _do_ you mean?” said Veronica with a spurt of laughter. She never
+waited to grope for one’s meaning, which instinct generally prompted one
+to offer her on the flat of the palm like a lump of sugar to a pony. “I
+can’t think,” she continued, “why he’s so determined to have you. You
+don’t effervesce. You’re not breathlessly modern—on his level!—every
+minute like we are. You can’t think how tired we get. That’s why Joan
+struck at coming this morning. She said she felt _old_....”
+
+Sydney looked along at Mr. Lee-Mittison. “_Ape!_” said she. Mr.
+Lee-Mittison was trumpeting like an elephant and writhing an imaginary
+trunk at the delighted Bransomes.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know; the old blighter rather amuses me,” said Veronica
+tolerantly, and squinted down at the tip of her cigarette. “Joan’s off
+colour, as a matter of fact,” she suddenly confided. “I believe she is
+keen on Victor Ammering.”
+
+“But isn’t he——”
+
+“Yes, he’s keen on me,” said Veronica indifferently. “But you get used
+to that if you’ve three sisters more or less the same age. Between us,
+we generally manage to keep people in the family.”
+
+Sydney pondered; she had no sisters and the ethics of the situation were
+beyond her. “You mean,” she said, “it would be more trying for Joan if
+_I_ wanted Victor Ammering?”
+
+“Oh, _I_ don’t want him, if that’s what you mean,” said Veronica, with
+the crudeness of sincerity. “Anyone can have him, as far as I am
+concerned.” She dangled an imaginary Victor airily, as though he were a
+marionette. “But I can’t imagine what you and poor old Victor would find
+to say to each other,” she added.
+
+“He did once try and kiss me, ages ago, at a dance,” Sydney said,
+reminiscently smiling.
+
+“I know, he told me: he said you were rather annoyed.”
+
+“I know I was—I hate being messed about.”
+
+“I said to him at the time: ‘Victor, you are the limit: you’ve no
+instinct.’”
+
+“I should have thought he had heaps.”
+
+Veronica looked at her sideways. “By the way,” she said, “why didn’t you
+go for that drive with Mrs. Kerr? They must have had heaps of room in
+the car and I should have thought——”
+
+“Oh, I’m sick of motoring,” Sydney said, and threw her cigarette away
+into the olive-trees. “Besides,” she added sombrely, “I don’t know their
+friends over there.”
+
+“Didn’t she ask you?”
+
+“Not exactly—no. Why should she?”
+
+“Oh, my dear girl, _I_ don’t know why she should!” Veronica shrugged her
+shoulders. A queer girl this, Veronica thought, well turned-out, clever
+presumably, with a complexion she might have done more with and awfully
+jolly feet, to sit brooding cheerlessly on a parapet because a
+middle-aged woman hadn’t asked her to go for a drive.
+
+“Well, come on,” she said, “Moses is getting the tribes together.”
+
+Sydney thought this surprisingly witty: she chuckled. “What do you think
+of our Aaron?” she asked, but Veronica did not hear. Mr. Lee-Mittison
+had swung his leg back over the parapet; his wife was putting her
+knitting away. They all got up rather unwillingly and began to climb the
+next path which left the road only too soon and was steeper than ever.
+
+They came up at last to the brow of the hill and found themselves at the
+extremity of a long ridge that stretched ahead of them, going down sheer
+at each side into a valley. From where they stood the ground dipped away
+again slightly then rose in a series of undulations to a point of rock
+whereupon a pale-coloured village balanced itself improbably. A
+mule-track which must have made a more gradual ascent up the side of the
+hill looped itself over a ridge a little ahead of them and vanished
+again. Beyond the village more hills, a disheartening infinity, rose
+blade-like, without shadow, against the vapourless and metallic
+brilliance of the sky. From the grass, among the twisted shadows of
+olives, flame-bright anemones spurted; Mr. Lee-Mittison precipitated
+himself upon them with a cry of pleasure and triumph. A scent of thyme
+stung the nostrils, reinforcing the glare with its pungency till two of
+the senses reeled.
+
+The picnic-party had not halted, doggedness had forbidden them even to
+pause, since they had left the parapet now immeasurably far below.
+Veronica Lawrence, wildly exclaiming “The Promised Land!” stumbled
+forward into the thyme and lay crucified. Eileen, incapable of more than
+a gesture, knelt down and stared in dismay at the hills which now
+promised no bounds to the activities of Mr. Lee-Mittison. The Bransomes,
+half-obliterated by the strain of the ascent, flopped sideways and in
+self-conscious abandon stood hugging an olive-tree.
+
+Sydney found Mr. Milton beside her; his face was glazed and dark and in
+spite of his ceaseless mopping the sweat streamed down so that he could
+hardly open his eyes.
+
+“_You_ don’t look hot at all,” he said reproachfully and Sydney who was
+enduring the burning discomfort of those who cannot perspire said
+snappily:
+
+“Well, we can’t all express ourselves.”
+
+“I wish,” he said ruefully, pushing a handkerchief round the inside of
+his collar, “that my self-expression were not quite so fluent.”
+
+She pushed back her hat and put her hand up to her forehead: it felt hot
+as a pebble on an August beach. They had straggled a little nearer the
+village so that the brow of the hill rose behind them, cutting away the
+horizon; and the sea, when they turned to look for it, was only visible
+in a triangle at the mouth of the valley below. She felt him waiting for
+her to speak and reluctantly asked “Do you like the village?” nodding
+ahead.
+
+“Yes,” he said, after a pause which gave the unhappy impression that he
+had sealed the village with his approval. “It’s jolly. It’s out of some
+background—looked at, you know, through an arch or the slit of a window.
+Look at the track leading up to it—there’s even a donkey.”
+
+“Yes, some Flight into Egypt!” said Sydney. She gathered from the
+lightness of his manner in making the allusion that he was anxious not
+to appear unduly conversant with the National Gallery or the Uffizi, and
+wanted to ask him “Haven’t you lectured on the Renaissance?” But she
+knew how inexorably the Hotel would refuse to let him escape from all
+that he was, and had pity on his innocent holiday taste for incognito,
+foredoomed from its birth on the threshold of the Hotel. Everybody could
+see at once that he had lectured and perhaps even taken people round the
+National Gallery. She looked disparagingly at the village with its
+toppling campanile.
+
+“I think,” she said, “that it’s rather too like a cruet.”
+
+“It may have inspired the cruet,” he gravely amended. “Can you tell me
+why it is walled?”
+
+She glanced suspiciously at him, but his limpid gaze held a real
+curiosity.
+
+“Against the Saracens. They used to land along this coast and ravage the
+valleys; so they built the villages as high as possible and fortified
+them. I pity any Saracen that ever got into them, for they’re perfect
+honey-combs and the people I think are cruel—in a leisurely sort of
+way.”
+
+“Ah!” said he with an air of pleased receptivity. “It would be
+interesting to get in touch with local records.”
+
+“I don’t know whether there are any. Do you remember the Decameron lady
+who bathed in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she
+liked from the first moment better than her husband?”
+
+“Husbands’ shares were not good in those days,” he said tolerantly. “I
+ought, by the way, to re-read my Decameron.”
+
+She wanted to ask him whether the Decameron had indeed been dedicated to
+him by a friend. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said, suddenly smiling, “if
+the Saracens were to appear on the sky-line, land, and ravage the Hotel?
+They all take for granted—down there—that there aren’t any more
+Saracens, but for all we know they may be only in abeyance. The whole
+Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. But I wonder,”
+she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, “how many of us
+they would really care to take away?”
+
+He did not know how she wished him to answer and risked: “It would be an
+embarrassing choice.”
+
+She sighed flatly. The dust, panic and ecstasy with which she had filled
+for a moment the corridors of the Hotel subsided. Once more she saw her
+fellow-visitors as they were to remain—undesired, secure and null. “Not
+many,” she said, and turning away from him seemed to be gazing down some
+distant, barred-away perspective of feminine loveliness. “Women must
+have deteriorated.”
+
+She half expected from Milton a flutter of protest, then noticed that
+she must have lost his attention, he was thinking about something else.
+He flushed and looked hard at her suddenly.
+
+“Excuse me,” he said. “Haven’t I met you before?”
+
+“Only last night,” said she, and grinned at the recollection more or
+less overtly. Then she wondered whether he knew that by just such a
+question do young men—at dances and elsewhere—strike for the first time
+the personal note. It is asked leaning forward intensely with the
+implication “Your ever-remembered face!” He could not have said this to
+many young women; he said it this time too awkwardly.
+
+“Ah yes, last night,” said he. “But surely before?—It occurred to me
+then.”
+
+“I don’t think so. Unless you are the sort of person who remembers faces
+he has sat opposite to in a bus.”
+
+“Ah well,” said James Milton. “It may have been that!”
+
+
+
+
+                                   VI
+
+
+Mrs. Lee-Mittison sat with the packets of lunch piled up round her like
+some homely goddess. She had spread out the mackintosh, on which she
+hoped she might later persuade Herbert to arrange himself
+(unobtrusively, for she did not wish to humiliate him before these dear
+girls who, unlike the girls of her own generation, seemed to be able to
+sit on questionably dry grass without after-effects). She sat with her
+hat tilted forward to shelter her eyes from the glare, looking down at
+her work but not knitting, her whole being in a state of happy
+suspension, a pause as distant from life as a trance. The sun wooed her
+persistently and at last, with a gesture for her almost dionysiac, she
+undid and flung open the woolly jacket buttoned across her chest.
+
+Herbert had taken the girls ahead with him further along the way to the
+village; she could hear his voice upraised in a sustained and happy
+monologue and now and then a thin exclamation from one of the Bransomes.
+They must be picking anemones. Surprised at herself, she sat with bliss
+in her little oasis of solitude. She looked down the slope beside her
+into the valley below and saw a little house, with a blue door whose
+colour delighted her, beside the bed of a river. Two lemon trees were
+beside it, and this little house which she seemed at once to inhabit
+gave her the most strange sensation of dignity and of peace. She saw
+herself go climbing up the garden from terrace to terrace calling the
+goat, and the goat, beautiful in its possessedness come loping down to
+meet her, asking to be milked. At this she paused in perplexity for she
+had never milked anything and turned cold at the thought of touching the
+udders of an animal. But in a moment this was over and she carried the
+milk, frothing warm in the pottery jug, inside into the dark interior of
+the house which would not be dark from within. Here something turned her
+back and she could not follow herself; she saddened, feeling excluded
+from some very intimate experience. The house was lonely, and in autumn
+when the river was brimming the rushing-past of the water must be
+terrifying; its echo would line with sound the upright walls of the
+valley. On still spring nights the thud of a falling lemon would be
+enough to awaken one in terror.
+
+The villino suddenly dropped away from her eye as though she had put
+down a telescope and as her life sprang back into focus she must have
+been dizzy, for she felt sick at the thought of their hotel bedrooms
+that stretched, only interspersed with the spare-rooms of friends, in
+unbroken succession before and behind her. She felt sick at the thought
+of for how many mornings more she would have to turn the washstand into
+an occasional-table by putting away the basin and jug in the cupboard
+and drape with Indian embroideries the trunk in which they concealed
+their boots.
+
+Mrs. Lee-Mittison saw that Sydney Warren and Mr. Milton had wandered
+away by themselves and that Veronica Lawrence, apparently unattached,
+was strolling among the olive-trees a little way down the slope. This
+did not seem like Veronica, and it was not like Veronica, either, to
+remain so persistently unaware of the ascending Englishman in the grey
+flannel coat coming so rapidly up towards her. Mrs. Lee-Mittison with
+faint misgivings thought she recognized the set of those shoulders and
+leaning forward a little saw from the shape of the head that this was
+indeed Victor Ammering. She quivered; the hill was too small, there were
+too many other hills for her to believe that this could be anything but
+a deliberate intrusion. Herbert particularly had not wanted Mr.
+Ammering. He did not care at all for the young man, who was
+unintelligent, too talkative and did not bring at all a nice atmosphere
+into a party. Herbert was quite sure the girls didn’t like Mr. Ammering
+either and would not wish him to be invited; that was the most
+delightful aspect of modern girls, they all liked just being jolly
+together.
+
+“Veronica,” she called sharply, “here just a minute, my dear!” She might
+have been calling back a paddling child from under the menacing curve of
+a breaker.
+
+“What for?” Veronica looked up at her in astonishment.
+
+“Mr. Ammering seems to be coming up the hill. I think he must be making
+some mistake.”
+
+“Well, it isn’t a private hill!” said Veronica. “I suppose he’s simply
+going for a walk.”
+
+“Don’t you think we had better tell him,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, “that
+his friends are not up here? It would save him the climb.” She fidgeted
+and swayed slightly; she was gathering Herbert’s happiness, all his
+little plans for the day, for protection under her feathers, and she
+gave such an impression of being ruffled-out, apprehensive and angry
+that she did actually make Veronica think of a hen, with head a little
+on one side and blinking bright eyes.
+
+“How odd,” said Veronica, sitting down on the grass still a little below
+her, “that Victor should have hit on this hill. I thought he was playing
+tennis. However, it’s his walk, and I suppose it’s his hill as much as
+ours. I can’t see that we can do anything about it, Mrs. Lee-Mittison,
+except be rude.” She took off her hat and shook back her fluffy cropped
+hair.
+
+“I hope I shall not be _rude_,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison with a quiver in
+her voice.
+
+“Hullo, Victor, I thought you were playing tennis!”
+
+“Do I look as if I was playing tennis?”
+
+“Fool!—You can’t come here, it’s somebody else’s picnic.”
+
+“Well, I suppose I can walk about on the hill!”
+
+“Fool—you do look hot! Go and walk about on one of the other hills.”
+
+“It does not matter to _us_, Veronica,” called down Mrs. Lee-Mittison,
+“Mr. Ammering’s plans for the day are his own, of course. I think you
+had better come up here, if you don’t mind and help me put out the
+lunch. Then we will call back the others.”
+
+Veronica pulled three pieces of bark from an olive-tree and threw them
+in Victor’s face, then she turned her back on him and came scrambling up
+the hill. Mrs. Lee-Mittison produced from her bag and spread out a
+printed paper table-cloth; her smile of competency usual to these
+occasions was a little dimmed by a still apprehensive consciousness of
+Victor’s presence below. With Veronica’s assistance she arranged the
+eatables. Veronica piled up the oranges in the middle of the cloth and
+ringed them round with Mrs. Lee-Mittison’s little biscuits and the
+chocolates wrapped in scarlet and gold. “There: the young housewife!”
+she cried, sitting back on her heels complacently. Mrs. Lee-Mittison
+thought of the cottage below and had once more the queer little pang.
+
+Sydney and James Milton returned by the loop of the road, which they had
+followed, they said, for a short distance in order to look into the
+further valley. She conveyed by the manner of her walk and by an air of
+serene inattentiveness that it was nothing to her that he should choose
+to accompany her; it must be his mistake; she had nothing to offer.
+Looking and feeling like her friend Mrs. Kerr she sat down and turned
+her face to the view. Mr. Milton was not still so hot, but he had been
+bouncing half a dozen conversational balls assiduously, and it was in
+evident relaxation that he lay down on his back on the grass like a dog
+and smiled up at the sky.
+
+“Here, we can’t all lie down, you know, it’s dinner!” screamed Veronica.
+“Who do you think’s going to drop the hard-boiled eggs into your mouth?
+_Gerrup!_” At the indescribable sound she made he sat up astonished. He
+had never been spoken to like this before and it deeply gratified him.
+By the time the others had assembled he was smiling and passing the food
+about and chaffing Veronica, perhaps a shade laboriously.
+
+“I say, I’d no idea you were a parson.”
+
+“Don’t I look like a parson?”
+
+“Oh no. I’m perfectly staggered. You may be a bishop or anything. Was I
+terribly disrespectful? Well, it’s not fair, anyway, you ought to wear
+_that_ kind of collar.”
+
+“The dog-collar? Dear me, you think I ought to advertise?” He was elated
+to find himself so much at ease, so disarmingly secular. “You spotted
+me, didn’t you?” He turned to Mr. Lee-Mittison, hoping to be
+contradicted.
+
+“My dear fellow, that is neither here nor there. I have always said that
+there is no reason why a parson shouldn’t be a Sportsman?”
+
+“That’s what my father says,” contributed one of the Bransomes. “I mean
+that there is no reason why a clergyman shouldn’t be a _man_. A Man of
+the World, you know.”
+
+“What on earth do you mean by ‘a Man of the World’?” asked Eileen
+Lawrence scornfully. She had no patience with other people’s
+vocabularies. The Bransome coloured and seceded from the conversation.
+She resolved that when she had returned to England she would cultivate a
+manner like the Lawrences’.
+
+“Speaking as a Churchwoman—” tendered Mrs. Lee-Mittison, busy with the
+sandwiches.
+
+“Anything at all, in fact,” said Sydney, “so long as he is nothing of
+the priest?”
+
+“God forbid!” said Mr. Lee-Mittison seriously. He was a Protestant.
+
+“Well, it’s God’s affair——”
+
+“Oh, there’s Victor!” shrieked Eileen, “I say, do look, Veronica,
+there’s Victor down there in the trees—look, he’s eating an orange. Hi,
+_coo-ee_ Victor: come up!”
+
+“Oh, we don’t want Victor up here,” Veronica said, “he’s a bore. Oh shut
+up, Eileen, leave him alone with his beastly orange. Messing it about
+all over his face, too, like a kid in a train.”
+
+“I think as Mr. Ammering is evidently on his own, Eileen, we ought not
+to interrupt his walk.” Mrs. Lee-Mittison had spoken with authority but
+Eileen took no notice and already the foundations of the picnic shook.
+Everybody stopped eating, rolled over sideways on their elbows and
+looked down. The Bransomes were intensely interested—how pathetic! “Why
+not ask him up?” said Sydney. James Milton suggested “Would you like me
+to go down?”
+
+“I think we had better not disturb Mr. Ammering’s walk,” repeated Mrs.
+Lee-Mittison despairingly. They all pointed out to her that he was
+already sitting down. She looked across at Herbert, the roof of her
+mouth turned cold: Herbert seemed so very much put out. She knew so much
+better than he did how often Herbert was hurt. Now all that lovely
+circle in which he most completely came alive had wavered, bulged and
+broken. She began a little wildly to recruit for attention. She tugged
+at Violet Bransome’s sleeve, she leaned sideways and tugged at the
+cousin’s; she signalled lavishly to Veronica and to Sydney. “I think Mr.
+Lee-Mittison has a story to tell you. I think he is going to tell you
+all a story now—Mr. Milton,” she whispered across, “do ask Eileen
+Lawrence to stay quiet. And ask Herbert (he’s so far away from me) ask
+him to begin....”
+
+Mr. Lee-Mittison began the story, which was about Malay. He raised his
+voice, drew out his words and was emphatic. One by one the girls
+returned their eyes to his face reluctantly. The more suggestible among
+them took their cues from Mrs. Lee-Mittison; and echoed her small
+exclamations. Herbert’s wife with tightly-folded hands was leaning
+forward eagerly. It would not have been thought possible that she had
+heard this story before were it not for the glance around with which at
+the approach of any salient point she would gather up the attention of
+the circle, and the dissyllabic titter with which she anticipated
+the humorous passages. Once she gripped a Bransome’s hand
+convulsively—“Isn’t it exciting?” After about ten minutes of this
+recital Victor Ammering appeared on the outskirts of the circle, stepped
+across the botany case and sat down. “I say” he said, “—excuse me,
+sir!—have any of you got a match?”
+
+“Then we saw the native crawling out from the darkness of the bushes,
+most impenetrable darkness, into a patch of moonlight. He had a knife
+between his teeth. It was a ticklish moment. My friend Murphy whispered,
+‘Don’t fire!’ We prepared—” Hanging breathlessly on his own words, Mr.
+Lee-Mittison looked intensely round at them. Their attention had again
+been dissipated. Only Violet Bransome, now uniquely faithful, echoed:
+“You prepared—And then——?”
+
+“I will wait,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison staring straight before him, “until
+the young ladies over there have finished talking.”
+
+“Oh, thanks most awfully,” Victor was exclaiming, his voice heard
+bleakly in the silence. Sydney, saying “Bounder!” in a soft aside,
+beneath her breath, had handed him across the matches. “And oh, look
+here,” Victor added, “do go on and all that. It sounds thrilling. I
+didn’t mean to interrupt.”
+
+“A story interrupted half way through can hardly be of interest. Pray
+don’t let us keep you from your walk.” Mr. Lee-Mittison glared; none of
+the party felt comfortable. Victor, who was not really such a bad young
+man and who had been simply dominated by the most developed of his
+instincts, heaved himself off the ground and declared himself ready to
+depart again. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I simply came to say that
+if any of you wanted to wash your hands and faces after eating oranges,
+I’ve found a tank down there among those gardens, quite clean, not a bit
+slimy and with no frogs.”
+
+“We have handkerchiefs, Mr. Ammering,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
+
+“Have I got orange on my face or anything?” asked Veronica and she
+turned her face up to Victor suddenly, away from the others, so that
+they could only guess by his expression what he saw there.
+
+“You have,” said he. “You’ve got orange right up round your ears. And
+you’ve got little bits of egg and stuff along your mouth.”
+
+“We have handkerchiefs,” repeated Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
+
+“I’ll wash,” declared Veronica, and suddenly, incredibly, outrageously
+she had gripped Victor’s hand, hoisted herself up by it, and walked away
+with Victor down the hill. She left a gap across which the others looked
+at one another, and which they felt unable to draw up and fill. Mrs.
+Lee-Mittison wished that they would all go away now, for a moment, she
+wanted to move up closer and sit next to Herbert. There was an uncertain
+silence. Then James Milton, who had been subject all his life to a kind
+of idiocy of nervousness, burst out laughing. The horrid sound which he
+could not contain appalled him; till at last to cover it he said to Mrs.
+Lee-Mittison, “Youth calls to youth, doesn’t it?” She replied, “I’m
+afraid I do not understand you.” They all stared, Sydney with such
+contempt that her face remained imprinted burningly upon his memory.
+Presently, intending no offence but entirely forgetting that the story
+was to be continued, she also got up and strolled round the hill. She
+wanted to enjoy her own thoughts which seemed all day to have been
+ceaselessly interrupted.
+
+Veronica and Victor scrambled very companionably down towards the tank.
+The descent was in places almost precipitous, they had to lower
+themselves from tuft to tuft of grass. Once, coming to an empty slope
+they lay and rolled down it; at another point they sat and slid. When
+trees interposed they swung themselves joyously, like young apes, from
+trunk to trunk. Every now and then they reappeared into sight of those
+above who, never ceasing to be aware of them, watched with covert but
+passionate interest. Their indifference, their recklessness, stirred
+something in the beholders, either envy or anger. At last almost
+simultaneously they leapt with a dual cry just audible to their friends
+into the soft tilled earth of a peasant’s garden. The little terrace
+projected like a shelf, like an apron-stage, over the depths of the
+valley. Here was Victor’s tank; round which, forgetting to wash, they
+soon began a most delectable water-battle.
+
+“Look,” cried one of the Bransomes irrepressibly, “they’re splashing
+each other with water!” The rest remained perfectly blank; Mrs.
+Lee-Mittison knitted.
+
+Veronica paused, and did her reputation the credit of a long enquiring
+guarded upward glance, which the steepness of the ground, the long grass
+and the closeness of the trees at a point combined to baffle. One’s own
+visibility is impossible to calculate. Then she scooped something out of
+the tank and put it down Victor’s neck. He seized her wrist and doubled
+it backwards. She writhed, and with a voluminous and graceful movement
+kicked him. As in a dance he whirled her round him suddenly and kissed
+her ear and her cheek. She hesitated, balanced against him, then
+appearing reconciled to his change of tactics, flung her head back and
+allowed him to continue. He must have kissed her lips then for the first
+time; their stillness for some moments was profound.
+
+Sydney’s imagination had failed her, she found herself disappointed in
+her own society and was coming back slowly to rejoin the others. To her,
+looking down unawares, the couple gesticulating soundlessly below in the
+sunshine appeared as in some perfect piece of cinema-acting, emotion
+represented without emotion. Then she wondered by what words now unknown
+to her she might arrive at this: to be seen swinging back against a
+man’s shoulder in that abandon of Veronica’s. She wondered whether at
+such a moment she would be cut off from herself, as by her other
+emotions. She watched the miniature unreal Veronica toss back her hair
+and walk away. At Victor she forgot to look again: she had not thought
+of him.
+
+She descended upon the others who seemed to be stupefied by something
+and to be at the same time scrutinizing one another and avoiding each
+other’s scrutiny. Then with a burst of talking they all came alive again
+and began clearing up the lunch, collecting pieces of paper which had
+strayed away and sweeping up orange-peel and egg-shells from among the
+grass. Eileen Lawrence whistled, Mr. Lee-Mittison sang. He was singing
+angrily a song that nobody knew. His wife was everywhere, she thanked
+the girls profusely as they heaped the debris into her basket. James
+Milton offered cigarettes about spasmodically, his cheeks burned. He
+kept striking matches, burning his fingers with them and throwing the
+matches away again with exclamations of unnecessary violence. He had
+never seen a man and woman kiss before and was battering in a kind of
+despair against the glass wall that divided him from experience. He was
+thankful, with a tinge of regret, that Sydney had not been among them;
+then he turned and saw her behind him, talking to Eileen Lawrence. He
+could not tell how long she had been there. Sydney was asking, “Do you
+mean to _tell_ Veronica?” Eileen surprised him by saying, “Not unless
+she asks me—what’s the good?”
+
+To the Lee-Mittisons, married, of an older generation, it was only
+possible for their guests to attribute one opinion. “Shocked!” they all
+assured themselves and instinctively moved away. James Milton found
+himself between two of the girls and walked with them along the side of
+the hill; the others distributed themselves ahead of him. He realized
+that the party had been divided against itself transversely into
+generations rather than vertically into sexes, and he was flattered to
+find himself accepted in this camp. They all moved off together talking
+vaguely about anemones, the village and the view.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Lee-Mittison remained alone. She did not look at her
+husband, as she was afraid she might look at him stupidly,
+sympathetically, and knew that this would annoy him. After a pause
+through which her needles clicked she said: “Well, I think it’s going
+off well, don’t you? They all seem to be happy.”
+
+He was walking restlessly round a small circle in which he seemed to be
+enclosed. His thumbs were tucked beneath the lapels of his coat and he
+stared round him critically at the expanse of day to be seen from the
+top of the hill. To left and right the sky sagged down to lower
+horizons.
+
+“Happy? I daresay. I guaranteed to keep you thoroughly happy.”
+
+“They’re dear girls. They’ll be coming back soon, won’t they?”
+
+“Of course,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison, still unable to catch sight of any
+of his party whom the hills seemed to have demolished. “I had suggested
+their going off on their own for a bit.”
+
+“Oh, I expected you must have. The lunch was nice, wasn’t it—the little
+biscuits?”
+
+“Excellent.”
+
+“It is nice to be alone a little. Oh Herbert, sit down on the
+mackintosh—wait, I’ll bring it over to you.”
+
+“The hills are a bit lonely—I don’t quite like them going away so far.”
+
+“Oh, they’ll be quite all right together—English girls. What a lovely
+bright day! We are always lucky in our weather.”
+
+They were sitting side by side on the grass like a young couple and for
+a moment she thought he might be going to pat her hand. She stopped
+knitting and waited, then, after a glance at his profile, quietly
+continued. She was saying to herself, “Oh, my dear Herbert, my poor
+Herbert!” and her mind grew dark with resentment against the others. If
+one might only, in intimation of what one felt, have pressed up ever so
+gently against his arm. But he had always to be considered successful;
+his head, though frequently bloody, might never be admittedly bowed.
+“_Very_ lucky,” she repeated, “in our weather.”
+
+“_Halloo!_” he shouted all at once, his hands like a triton’s making a
+cave round his mouth. “Halloo-alloo-alloo-alloo!” They listened and
+heard only an echo at the end of a valley. He shouted again; still
+nobody answered.
+
+“I’m a bit disappointed in Milton,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison. “I didn’t
+take him for that sort of fellow. I don’t think I’ll ask him to come
+with us again.”
+
+“Perhaps better not,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+
+The lift was out of order. Mrs. Hillier, who was in a hurry, had for
+some time been pushing the third floor button unavailingly: the lift did
+not even tremble. She then pushed the second and fourth floor buttons as
+an experiment, but to this also there was no response. She slid back the
+iron gates again and stepped out into the lounge so suddenly and so
+angrily that Miss Fitzgerald who had been watching sympathetically was
+quite frightened.
+
+“The lift is out of order,” she said tersely. “Where can the concierge
+be?”
+
+“He is always out at this hour. They say he has a wife in the town.”
+
+“I do not see why we should be prevented from going to our rooms because
+the concierge happens to be married.”
+
+“Anyhow, he is no good with the lift. They ought to keep a boy who
+thoroughly understands it.”
+
+“He would have an attachment too,” said Mrs. Hillier, who was really a
+cheerful and humorous person. With renewed determination she got back
+into the lift, and Miss Fitzgerald, getting in also for company, sat
+down beside her on the narrow seat. This was the most comfortable,
+intimate and exclusive corner of the hotel and Miss Fitzgerald dreamily
+desired it. It was the kind of place in which one could have talked.
+They pushed each button successively and even struck chords of two or
+three at a time. A wire twanged somewhere above and a chain rattled but
+they did not move an inch.
+
+“At any rate,” said Miss Fitzgerald, “it is better than to be taken half
+way up and then stuck between two of the floors. My friend told me she
+once saw that happen to some ladies at a hotel in Switzerland. They were
+there for more than half an hour with their feet just visible below the
+ceiling of the lounge. The hotel was full of foreigners and it was most
+unpleasant.”
+
+“Dreadful,” said the Anglo-Indian lady. She at all events could
+congratulate herself on her feet. “Oh,” she cried, peering birdlike
+through the bars of the gate, “can’t some of you help us?”
+
+Colonel Duperrier and a Mr. Miller had risen and were approaching
+politely from different corners of the lounge. The ladies got out of the
+lift and the gentlemen, getting in, assured themselves that there was
+really something very wrong indeed.
+
+“I _cannot_ see,” said Mrs. Hillier mutinously, “why I should have to do
+without my scissors.” Colonel Duperrier felt very sorry for her, she
+seemed to be beating her wings. “Couldn’t I—?” he began.
+
+“Oh no, thank you.” The scissors were in her bedroom, as they both knew.
+One was drawn up from here out of ken, feet last, into the region of
+intimacies.
+
+“And I cannot see why they should expect one to walk up. _I_ shan’t,”
+said Mrs. Hillier flinging her gauntlet, to applause, in the face of the
+Management. “I can’t see why they should,” agreed Miss Fitzgerald while
+Mr. Miller, sighing over this insoluble enigma, returned slowly to his
+patience-board. Colonel Duperrier rang twice for the Management, then
+looked into the dining-room to see whether the head waiter were there
+and could be asked to do anything. At three o’clock in the afternoon the
+Management and the personnel seemed to be equally inaccessible. They
+were perhaps asleep, like many of the visitors.
+
+Sleep, the thin uneasy sleep of daylight, had to-day been the refuge of
+many, for cold rain fell ceaselessly past the windows. It was a
+transparent rain without mist, like summer rain in England, through
+which trees and buildings for a great distance could be seen distinctly
+in a Japanese conventionality and flatness. Leaves and long palm-fronds
+shone and trickled. Curtained in this pale gloom, the Hotel seemed
+permeated by a sense of the rain’s despairing persistency, against which
+the reasonable conviction of visitors that the sun, bound by contract
+with the locality, was soon to appear again put up cold walls around an
+inward emptiness. In many rooms the tick of travelling-clocks, the
+stutter of rain along the balconies were being listened to attentively.
+
+Mrs. Hillier snuggled up her woolly wrap round her ears, nodded to
+Colonel Duperrier and went back into the drawing-room. She seemed, from
+the desolation, dusk and excludedness of the lounge to return at least
+into _something_. As she opened and shut the glass doors he heard a kind
+of gasp of feminine conversation and saw his wife and many other ladies
+sitting round in a semicircle with firelight on their knees. There was
+one open fireplace in the Hotel and it was in the drawing-room. She must
+have told them at once that the lift was out of order, for there arose
+staccato indignation which the door shut off from him. The lounge with
+its grouped furniture was of an isolating vastness. A man,
+unrecognizable from here, sat leaning his back against one radiator; Mr.
+Miller with his patience-board had drawn up as close as possible to
+another. One longed for the disorder of firelight among the orderly
+shadows. One missed one’s dog. One missed the tug of association and
+habit towards one chair: there were too many, groves of chairs through
+which Colonel Duperrier wandered sadly. He could not even remember where
+he had been sitting before.
+
+Miss Fitzgerald, standing on tiptoe, peeped over the lace blind through
+the glass of the drawing-room doors, sighed and shook her head. The room
+presented too unbroken a front of matronhood. She was expressing her
+feelings in dumb show for the benefit of nobody in particular, as is the
+habit of lonely, self-conscious women. She observed, still to nobody in
+particular, “Well, I suppose if piggy _won’t_ get over the stile, I’ll
+have to walk.”
+
+“—I beg your pardon?” asked Colonel Duperrier.
+
+“Oh, nothing,” said Miss Fitzgerald, startled, and began her painful
+ascent. Her room was on the highest floor. She disappeared.
+
+A girl with fair hair proved on closer inspection to be one of the
+Lawrences. She was hunched over one of the writing-tables, trying to
+write a letter with a Hotel pen that screeched and staggered. She leant
+on her elbows, tilting her chair up. At an impatient movement from her,
+two or three sheets of letter-paper, thinly covered, fluttered to the
+ground. “Oh _Lord_!” she exclaimed and dived after them.
+
+“Let me!” said Colonel Duperrier, hurrying across the lounge. “Got it,
+thanks,” replied Joan Lawrence, once more arranging the sheets round her
+elbow so that the slightest movement must again disturb them. Her
+writing was enormous and watching her absently he could not help seeing
+“the very limit” “macaroni” and “torn it.” He looked quickly away.
+
+She twirled her pen and stared at the nib resignedly. “Pen’s the limit.”
+
+“It looks it. You might find a better one in the drawing-room.”
+
+“I daresay. Thanks very much, but I’m not going into the drawing-room.”
+She was being friendly and pleasant with him: they both laughed. When
+she laughed, the sunburnt copper-pink of her cheeks deepened. She was
+not so difficult, after all, to distinguish from her sisters.
+
+“Oh, come,” said he, “you’ve never turned your back on don or devil! Go
+in and look for a pen. They won’t eat you.”
+
+“If you were a kind man, _you_ would.”
+
+“Look here, take my Onoto.”
+
+“Oh no, thanks. Nothing but grief and bitterness comes of borrowing
+other people’s Onotos. _Do_ go and get me that pen! I dare you....” She
+drew down her upper lip and stared at him with solemnity. Both liking
+each other better than ever, they laughed again. He was a tall brown man
+with long legs, a little younger than the Lawrences’ father. His fair
+hair was going white round the temples; strictly speaking it was
+pepper-and-salt. He was one of their finest tennis-players and waltzed
+beautifully in the old-fashioned manner, holding one gingerly. His wife
+was the limit; she was one of the drawing-room set.
+
+“Go on, I dare you to!” repeated Joan. He stood a moment longer tugging
+his short moustache, then braced himself, magnificently squaring his
+shoulders. “Oh, very well,” said he. He hesitated in front of the
+lace-hung doors, whose appearance seemed to appall him. “Funk!” called
+Joan excitedly, and he pushed the doors open and went in. She heard wave
+after wave of exclamations arising. The door, which had swung to after
+him, did not open again; she could no longer see his shadow on the
+glass. She began to wish she had not thrown her glove into the lion’s
+den. Joan had a healthy contempt for women like Miss Fitzgerald, but she
+was a little daunted by the habituées of the drawing-room who played
+bridge crushingly well, were impeccably manicured and had a hardish eye
+that negatived one’s importance. She sat watching the door anxiously.
+After all, he _belonged_ to those people, it was possible he might not
+reappear.
+
+But Colonel Duperrier respected these ladies too deeply to wish to
+remain among them. He came out again modestly but with an air of
+achievement.
+
+“Here you are! But I don’t know that it’s really much better.”
+
+“I’ll pretend it is, anyway. Did they mind your taking it?”
+
+“No,” said he, uncommunicative. He drew up a chair and sat not far away
+from her while she scribbled experimentally with the new pen. It gave
+him a restful, anchored feeling to sit beside somebody who was doing
+something. He looked at the back of Joan’s neck, from which the cropped
+hair fell away, with uncovetous appreciation. What he believed himself
+to be feeling was that it would have been jolly to have had a daughter.
+If Colonel Duperrier’s wife were to die he would marry some girl of
+twenty-three who would be very much in love with him and with whom he
+would be very happy. Colonel Duperrier had never thought of this, but it
+was evident to women. As she continued to draw profiles on an envelope
+and showed no signs of going on with her letter he enquired, “Have you
+any idea how long that lift’s been out of order? I rather wish they’d
+let me overhaul the thing. Of course I don’t profess to know anything
+about mechanics, but I’ve always had a bent that way. I can’t help
+feeling I——”
+
+“It’s been getting sicker and sicker since this morning. I think the
+people going upstairs after lunch must have finished it. You see,
+Veronica and Victor were playing hide-and-seek with the Barry children
+and some of them got into the lift and sent it up and down full speed
+about four times without stopping.”
+
+“Very high-spirited of them,” said Colonel Duperrier. “_Can’t_ young
+Ammering get a job?”
+
+“No, he can’t,” Joan said defensively. “It worries him awfully. The
+War’s come very hard indeed on our generation. I don’t think people
+understand a bit.”
+
+“Perhaps they don’t,” said Colonel Duperrier, who had also fought.
+
+“We have to make allowances for ourselves,” continued Joan. “You see,
+nobody makes them for us. I know young people are always supposed to be
+fearfully idealistic and that sort of thing, but I suppose _we_ can’t
+help feeling that considering how hard things are on us, we aren’t
+really so bad.”
+
+“But do people criticize you all?” marvelled Colonel Duperrier who was
+slightly out of the movement. “I personally can understand very well how
+hard this is on Ammering—having nothing to do but rot about here for the
+winter. At his age, it would have driven me clean off my head.”
+
+“We think he takes it awfully well,” said Joan, a little flushed. “Of
+course we all like him very much.”
+
+“Lucky fellow!”
+
+“Oh well.... Of course, for anyone like you to be out here must be
+awfully jolly. Everyone approves, and your work’s over and nobody wants
+you to do anything more.”
+
+“No, I shan’t be wanted again,” agreed Colonel Duperrier thoughtfully.
+“It’s a good thing I’m fond of tennis. I suppose that’s why one feels
+strongly about young fellows like Ammering; I mean, seeing them done out
+of what really is their due.”
+
+“I don’t suppose Victor would mind being you. I shouldn’t wonder if he
+sometimes suffered from the same awful feeling as I do, like being
+sleepy in the morning and wishing it were bedtime. About lunch-time one
+begins to buck up.” Joan rubbed her chin thoughtfully with the end of
+her pen. She was more imaginative than either of her sisters. “_You’re_
+just about at tea-time, aren’t you?”
+
+“I suppose I am,” agreed Colonel Duperrier. “Five o’clock tea.” He
+thought to himself that it was the kind of tea women sat over till it
+was time for dinner. At this he began to yawn cavernously, shivered and
+apologized.
+
+“One does miss one’s tea out here,” said Joan. “The tea-gardens are so
+breaking; we can’t afford to go there, and the patisserie place is
+stuffy and full of Italians and one does get sick of pigging it up in
+one’s room with a spirit-lamp.”
+
+“I’m too shy to go to the tea-gardens,” said Colonel Duperrier, “but I
+should like to. I hear the tea there is quite decent. Will you,
+sometime, come and have tea with me there?”
+
+“Thanks very much, I should like to,” said Joan, in the business-like
+tone in which she accepted invitations from the opposite sex. She wanted
+to go on talking about Victor to somebody who did not at once suspect
+and smile. So she said, “It must be very nice for you, having no future
+to think of.” A moment ago she had seemed to understand so well that he
+almost believed she had said this to hurt him. “No _future_?” he
+repeated and looked at her blankly.
+
+“Well,” said Joan, “you haven’t got to do anything that matters. You’ve
+got nobody but yourself to please and, of course, your wife. While a
+young man, like—well, oh anyone—say Victor Ammering, has got the whole
+beastly thing ahead of him. I suppose it won’t all be beastly, I mean,
+he’ll fall in love and I suppose, marry, and sooner or later his
+father’ll die and then he’ll have some money of his own, but in the long
+run it’s all rather an effort.”
+
+“He’s not ambitious?”
+
+“Oh no,” said Joan placidly, “he isn’t a bit that kind of man. Besides,
+what’s the good of being ambitious, there may be another war. And even
+if there isn’t, disappointed people are dreadful to live with.”
+
+“Why are you so cynical?” asked Colonel Duperrier.
+
+“But I’m not,” said Joan, and smiled at him with troubled but naïve blue
+eyes.
+
+As she spoke three people in mackintoshes, two women and a man, came
+rustling and dripping from the porch. Their collars were turned up and
+over these they looked repudiatingly at one another. They had not been
+for their walks together, and they did not wish anybody to think that
+they had. They had followed one another for some kilometres along a
+streaming road, to close up unavoidably on the Hotel doorstep. Among
+them was James Milton, wondering why he had ever come abroad, cold,
+weary, amazed by the weather. Dripping audibly they all got into the
+lift and slammed the gates upon their undesired contiguity. Here they
+remained for some moments shut up in silence.
+
+“I’m afraid it’s out of order,” shouted Colonel Duperrier at the risk of
+appearing officious. Joan had looked on with detachment.
+
+James Milton, only too glad to escape, let himself out at once and
+walked upstairs, after a wistful, enquiring glance in Joan’s direction.
+Numbed beyond the point of geniality, not one of his fellow-visitors had
+spoken to him during the day; he realized that this was the third
+Lawrence whom he did not know and that she was not going to speak to him
+either. Joan watched him critically till he had disappeared round the
+turn of the stairs.
+
+“That’s the parson,” said she. “He went with them yesterday with the
+Lee-Mittisons’ picnic.”
+
+“Oh yes, the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic. We saw them start off. Wasn’t it
+rather a fiasco?”
+
+“Yes, it was. After lunch they were bored, so they all went off on their
+own, and Veronica met Victor and they went off too. When they came back,
+quite a short time afterwards, the Lee-Mittisons had flitted—there
+wasn’t so much as an egg-shell. So they all halloed for a bit, and some
+of them lay down and went to sleep. Veronica and Victor came home on
+their own, and the others got tired of calling the Lee-Mittisons and
+came home too, thinking nothing more of it. Eileen likes the parson, so
+does Sydney; they say he is rather an ass but wonderfully sporting. They
+expected to find the L.-M.’s at home, but the L.-M.’s didn’t turn up
+till half way through dinner, looking fearfully sick. Old L.-M. came
+over to father between the soup and the fish, simply snorting. He said
+to father, ‘I suppose you realize what your daughter has been exposed
+to?’ We think old L.-M. is quite mad. I was awfully glad I hadn’t gone.”
+
+“I should think you were,” said Colonel Duperrier absently. He wanted to
+ask her—“Couldn’t we go off some day for a walk in the hills?” He tried
+this over and over in his head but it didn’t sound right somehow. He
+supposed that the suggestion must be unsuitable: and that at all events
+she would be bored with him. As if to settle the matter once and for
+all, Joan said, with an unhappy note in her voice as she thought of the
+meeting of Veronica and Victor, “And anyway, I’m not much of a walker. I
+don’t care for walking at all.”
+
+
+
+
+                                  VIII
+
+
+After Colonel Duperrier had left the drawing-room the ladies round the
+fire folded back their skirts over their knees again to keep the stuff
+from scorching, drew their chairs in closer and resumed their discussion
+of Mrs. Kerr. Their backs were turned in a kind of contempt to the tall
+windows through which cold light from the sky and the sea poured in on
+them gravely.
+
+“I cannot think,” said one, “what a woman of that sort finds to do with
+herself.” She spoke with emphasis, this remark had been throughout a
+recurring-point in the conversation. “She has no interests. She hasn’t a
+large correspondence, she does nothing at all for herself. I personally
+find the day so very full here, it seems only too short.”
+
+“I wouldn’t say _too_ short. But as days abroad go, one seems to get
+through them quickly enough.” To this there was a hum of agreement.
+
+“She sits on her balcony in the sun,” said Mrs. Hillier, “a thing which
+I for one should never have time to do. I suppose one has too much
+conscience. If I ever do go out on my balcony for a minute and look
+along, there she always is, and if I call out in a friendly way
+‘Whatever are you doing?’ she says ‘Nothing’ and looks amused and rather
+superior.”
+
+“She doesn’t sketch, or one would understand her staring like that at
+the view. Of course, it is very beautiful.”
+
+“She may think,” said another of the ladies, looking up from some
+_broderie anglaise_ over which she had been straining her eyes. She was
+of some prestige, her speech was slow and weighted down with
+implications. “She must think a good deal,” she decided; “nobody who was
+not thinking could do absolutely nothing all day and look so very
+superior about it, like a cat.”
+
+“You mean that she has something on her mind?”
+
+The lady of the embroidery rubbed her sore eyes with two fingers,
+revolving this slowly. She opened her eyes again tentatively, blinked
+once or twice and shut them again. “The light is very poor,” she said
+aggrievedly.
+
+“Very. Won’t you take my place, Mrs. Hepworth, it is nearer the
+window.—You mean to say that she has something on her mind?”
+
+“No, thank you very much, I do not care to move from this side of the
+fire.—I should rather say that she had something _in_ her mind all the
+time, at the back of it. One is never comfortable in talking to her,
+though she is, I am sure, brilliant. I have said to myself over and over
+again, when I’ve been with her: ‘That woman has something at the back of
+her mind.’”
+
+“I wonder, what?” asked someone rashly. “That,” said Mrs. Hepworth
+coldly, “would be quite impossible to say.”
+
+There were about seven ladies present, all embroidering something
+useless and therefore permissible, except Mrs. Duperrier, who, poor
+soul, was too restless, and another lady who with the aid of much
+gamboge and vermilion was touching up a water-colour, a sunset. At four
+o’clock they would all retire for tea, after that they would go
+downstairs to the basement into what was called the smoking-room and
+play bridge with the intermission only of dinner till it was time for
+bed. Though keen players, the seven were not to be numbered among the
+enthusiasts. Those, after a perfunctory glance at the weather, had sat
+down to their tables soon after eleven o’clock. Nobody who smoked but
+did not play bridge dared enter the smoking-room.
+
+Out of deference to Mrs. Bellamy, who was among them, nobody had so far
+touched on the aspect of Mrs. Kerr which most profoundly intrigued
+them—her friendship with Sydney. Tessa, however, now showed herself
+lacking in that appreciation of their delicacy with which it had pleased
+them to credit her. Stretching out a plump pretty foot to the fire and
+looking down at it thoughtfully she remarked, “She seems a very kind
+woman. She’s been so kind to my cousin.”
+
+“Ah really, yes?” said someone innocently. “Your cousin’s often with
+her, I believe.”
+
+“Yes, they are a lot together. Sydney is a very clever girl,” said Tessa
+simply. “She is too clever for girls of her own age, I sometimes think,
+though, she is so high-spirited and cheerful and amusing that she is
+always popular. I often forget when I am with her, how clever she is. Do
+you know, she studied for years ... she has passed....” Here she
+enumerated, not accurately, Sydney’s academic distinctions which, while
+not conveying much to her audience, vaguely depressed them.
+
+“Ah yes, it is nice for a girl to have a career. But I shouldn’t,” said
+a lady with some restraint, tempering her suggestion with a smile, “say
+that Miss Warren was high-spirited, exactly?” The others disagreed too
+forcibly with Tessa’s opinion of her cousin and respected Tessa too much
+to say anything at all.
+
+Tessa continued, “Sydney is very affectionate.”
+
+“She is very much ... absorbed, isn’t she, by Mrs. Kerr?”
+
+“I have known _other_ cases,” said somebody else, looking about vaguely
+for her scissors, “of these very violent friendships. One didn’t feel
+_those others_ were quite healthy.”
+
+“I should discourage any daughter of mine from a friendship with an
+older woman. It is never the best women who have these strong
+influences. I would far rather she lost her head about a man.”
+
+“Sydney hasn’t lost her head,” said little Tessa with dignity.
+
+“Oh but, Mrs. Bellamy—I was talking about _other_ cases.”
+
+“And how few men there are out here—can one wonder the girls are
+eccentric? They say it’s the same at all these places—not a man to be
+had. I can’t think why people go on bringing their daughters out.”
+
+“One wonders, indeed, why some types of women ever come out here.”
+
+“Mrs. Kerr? Oh, do you think—?”
+
+“Mmm-mmm.”
+
+“But she may believe in the sun,” said Tessa. “Many people believe in
+the sun. Of course it’s always been known of, but quite recently a
+doctor at Baden——”
+
+“She is not a sick woman,” pronounced the lady of the _broderie
+anglaise_.
+
+“N-no?” said Tessa, petering out. “But I’m sure,” she resumed, after a
+pause for consideration, “that she has interests. I would say she was
+quite independent. Sydney tells me she likes to be a great deal alone.”
+
+“Well, there now!” exclaimed a lady indignantly, dropping her needlework
+into her lap and holding both hands out. “Then why should she want to
+come out to a Hotel? She certainly is striking-looking but I would have
+every sympathy with her and make every effort to be pleasant to her if
+she were lonely. One knows oneself that is insupportable. As winter
+comes on with those long evenings one begins to feel hardly human,
+sitting evening after evening in an empty room. One can’t always be
+going out or visiting people or inviting people to come to one. If I
+shut my drawing-room door, I begin to feel restless at once; it feels so
+unnatural shutting oneself in with nobody. If I open it, one hears the
+servants laughing, or something to worry one. I am fond of reading but I
+always begin to feel that books are so bad; then of course I realize,
+well: it’s not fair, is it, to expect a book to take the place of human
+society? If the telephone-bell rings, to hear a voice and then be cut
+off simply unsettles one, and if it doesn’t ring the whole evening one
+begins to worry and imagine things about one’s friends. Once I sat with
+the door open and believe me, I could hear four different clocks
+ticking, I counted them, in different parts of the flat. It’s not of
+course that I’m nervous but I really begin to feel—if you’ll understand
+my saying anything so extraordinary—as if I didn’t exist. If somebody
+does come to the door or the telephone does ring I’m almost surprised to
+find I’m still there. One would go mad if one were not able to get
+abroad.”
+
+She looked round with a shiver of retrospection at the semicircle which
+was her pleasant asylum. The others expressed their entire agreement.
+What they had all escaped was terrible. “But Mrs. Kerr,” said one,
+“seems to enjoy that—She’s a divorcée?”
+
+“No, he died.”
+
+“Fancy! She doesn’t give one a bit that impression....”
+
+“Isn’t there a son?”
+
+“Yes, she has a nearly grown-up son. I can’t think why she doesn’t make
+a home for him.”
+
+“But if one does make a home for anybody one is still very much alone.
+The best type of man is no companion.”
+
+“—Still, he is someone _there_.”
+
+“Besides, my dear, make a home...! Of course it’s what one would love to
+do but it nearly kills one and it’s so expensive; and when all’s said
+and done it’s still so uncomfortable these days one can’t expect a man
+to stay in it. Of course we don’t mind in the same way about comfort,
+but really it is scarcely fit for oneself. So I said to my husband— ...
+he agreed.... It is so broadening to the mind, isn’t it? to travel and
+meet people; we have been so fortunate in the hotels that were
+recommended to us and we have been passed on from introduction to
+introduction so that we have always got to know people at once.”
+
+“—And as for the son,” put in another lady who had been waiting with
+parted lips, “he really may not want her. And I rather wonder about him,
+too. One of my boys was at school with him and said he was not at all
+popular. He won’t say why, of course, the Kerr boy wasn’t popular; you
+know what boys are, they are so reserved. But one felt of course, that
+there was something. Boys, you know, are rather wonderful; they have a
+judgment that—well, a kind of instinct.”
+
+“Like dogs?”
+
+“Oh, my dear Mrs. Hepworth....”
+
+“I must say, if the girl were in _my_ charge, were a cousin of
+_mine_....”
+
+“Even then, though I wonder if one would be justified in interfering?”
+
+“It would be difficult. But I do feel strongly....”
+
+“Yes ... _yes_?”
+
+“Well, I know of a case——”
+
+They all broke off as the door opened and Sydney looked in nonchalantly
+as though she hardly expected to find whoever she was looking for.
+
+“Oh, Tessa, there you are! I couldn’t think why you weren’t on your bed.
+We have no stamps: I have been looking for you in despair. Nobody I’ve
+met has a stamp and the concierge must be asleep somewhere!”
+
+She was standing on the threshold holding the door open so that the cold
+air from the lounge rushed in from behind her. She did not look as
+though she had been out all day; her heavy eyes and the way her hair had
+been pushed away from her forehead suggested that she had a headache.
+She was asked to come right in, if she did not mind, and shut the door
+after her; and she complied absently. She came and stood behind Tessa’s
+chair while Tessa fumbled with her note-case; they all remarked her air
+of not unhappy abstraction and how, like a shy, self-centred child who
+has been sent down into company on a message and wishes at once to
+escape, she remained indifferent to their presence and made no effort to
+speak to them. Once she put her hand out and patted Tessa’s head idly.
+“Do hurry, darling,” said she.
+
+“So you’ve been writing letters all day; dear me!” said the lady of the
+_broderie anglaise_, looking over her glasses.
+
+“Nothing would persuade me to,” said Sydney.
+
+“It’s dull for you young people on a day like this. No wonder the Miss
+Lawrences were romping.”
+
+“Were they? I didn’t notice.”
+
+“Oh, as you said ‘we’ I thought you had been with Veronica.”
+
+“I haven’t seen Veronica all day,” said Sydney and while everybody
+listened intently she turned away from Tessa’s chair and wandered over
+to the window. “Doesn’t it rain; I like it!” she was moved to exclaim.
+“If I were Manet and alive now I would paint this and present the
+picture to the P. L. M. as a poster for the Côte d’Azur.” She smiled out
+at the rain with an air of complicity.
+
+“Well, what on earth _have_ you been doing with yourself all day?” asked
+Mrs. Hepworth, who was so motherly looking that she could ask anybody
+anything point-blank.
+
+Sydney frowned for a moment as though she were trying to remember.
+“Thinking,” she said at last, “with great pleasure of the thousands of
+villas round the hundreds of bays along these hundreds of miles of coast
+where the couples are living—as one is told they are living—for one
+another. Think what living for one another at close quarters would be
+like to-day. Think specially of what, before they became so rare, it
+would have been like to be living with a Russian. ‘It has been raining
+for weeks, the hay is rotting and we are living on allusions’—But
+perhaps you don’t read Russian plays? Even in fine weather, I must say I
+think the importance of the personal relations is very much
+overestimated. Oh, thank you, Tessa; then I’ll owe you three lire for
+the stamps.”
+
+“Yes, we’re very shockable in here,” said Mrs. Hillier briskly, “as I
+expect you thought. Personally I think the interest of these improper
+couples is, in all weathers, very much overestimated, but for girls of
+your age they have always a great fascination. I know they had for me
+until I went to India. You and your young friend must have been enjoying
+yourselves, chatting away.”
+
+“I haven’t got a young friend,” said Sydney, and now quite unable to
+refrain from laughing at herself she guffawed at Mrs. Hillier with a
+keen appreciation of her own ridiculousness but with unabated gloom.
+
+“Then won’t you stay down here and make up the second four for bridge?
+You see there are only seven of us; we’ll be going down directly.”
+
+“Oh thank you, no; I must be going up.”
+
+“—You know the lift is out of order?”
+
+“Is it? I never use it. I put the kettle on for tea just now and I must
+go and keep an eye on it.”
+
+“Can’t Mrs. _Kerr_ keep an eye on the kettle for you?” Mrs. Hepworth
+called after her.
+
+“She forgets about it,” said Sydney, as she left the drawing-room.
+
+
+
+
+                                   IX
+
+
+Three days afterwards the weather along that coast was once more
+fulfilling the expectations of visitors. Only a little wind remained to
+disturb the sea, rustle dryly through the palm-trees out on the
+promontory where the coast-road disappeared toward Genoa, and rush to
+meet one round street-corners with a disconcertingly ice-cold whistle.
+Against an opaque, bright-blue sky the expressionless faces of the
+buildings had again their advertised and almost aching whiteness. The
+sounds like the shadows were exact and clear-cut, no longer blunted by
+the rain.
+
+From end to end of the town the principal long street ran like a funnel;
+as Sydney came out of the flower-shop her side of the street was
+slate-grey in the shadow of early afternoon. It was characteristic of
+her as an intelligent young English lady that she should have come to
+buy carnations during the hour of the siesta, thus cutting for herself a
+caprice of her own direct across the custom of the land. The carnations
+among which, walking slowly, she now was burying her face were scentless
+but gave one an acute pleasure by the chilly contact of their petals.
+She had an armful of two colours, sulphur with a ragged edge of pink and
+ashy mauve with crimson at the centre, crimson-veined. Carnations are
+not costly here before they reach the flower-market, grown on terraces
+that stagger up the hills and picked in the grey quiet of the morning to
+the accompaniment of singing and never-answered calls that come dropping
+down forlornly from terrace to terrace into the valleys. On account of
+their low cost, their strangeness to the northern eye and the vehemence
+of their colouring they have been made the vehicle of much emotion. One
+cannot, however casually, present these native carnations to a friend
+and remain entirely unaffected, while the pleasure with which carnations
+are received is intensified by some vague agitation.
+
+Sydney’s day had been so far as perfect as a bubble; she felt careless
+of it, as though the bubble could not burst. Happiness, she said to
+herself, is not to be solicited, but coming, for however short a time,
+comes with an appearance of finality, to be juggled with off-hand. It
+seems to be some kind of balance, as in riding a bicycle, attempted
+painfully a thousand times and achieved at last without effort. Her
+senses were absorbed by the carnations, she barely looked ahead, and she
+could be conscious of the street only as a sharp distinction between sun
+and shadow. Crossing over she walked in the sun, where dogs stretched
+out their lengths in abandon on the hot pavement. She must have been
+made conspicuous by her abstraction or her yellow dress; people turned
+to stare at her, and a tram, announced by a hum of overhead wires,
+rushed past with a long smudge of faces turned her way. She left the
+street but delayed her return to the Hotel by following a series of
+bye-paths, pausing now and then to stare idly through some barred gate
+into a garden. She was mapping out for herself a deep-down life in which
+emotions ceased their clashing together and friends appeared only as
+painted along the edge of one’s quietude.
+
+At a turn of the footpath she met the Barry children going down to the
+shore with their nurse. There were several of them, very much alike;
+their number appalled Sydney who stood back against the wall. Cordelia
+Barry, the eldest, walked by herself a little ahead of the others,
+ostentatiously carrying a book.
+
+“The _whole_ family of us all again, you see!” she exclaimed affectedly.
+“Oh, dear Miss Warren, what lovely carnations! Oh, I do love them!” She
+was a child of about eleven with thin legs and an eager tremolo. Sydney,
+who considered that she had been demoralized by over much grown-up
+attention, said “Do you?” unresponsively. She did not intend to give any
+carnations to Cordelia.
+
+“You _aren’t_ going for a walk, I suppose?” said Cordelia wistfully.
+“Mother said I might go with anybody who would have me, but that I would
+have to go with Nanny if everybody else fell through.”
+
+“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you. But I expect it will be nice on the
+shore.”
+
+“Hoo!” said Cordelia, pouncing on this note of falsity. She tilted her
+head back to stare up at Sydney from under the brim of her hat. “How
+stupid you’d be if you really believed that! Nice on the shore!”
+
+“Come along, Cordelia,” called back Nanny in the flat voice of one who
+is employing the imperative continually and without effect.
+
+Cordelia clutched at Sydney’s dress. “Lovely yellow thing,” she said
+feverishly, “_Beautiful_ Miss Warren, won’t you take me for a walk?”
+
+Sydney, who was still near enough to her own childhood to mistrust
+children profoundly, wondered what Cordelia could be getting at. “Not
+to-day,” she temporized, “some day, perhaps.”
+
+“Come _on_, Cordelia!”
+
+“Go on, Cordelia: Nanny’s calling.”
+
+“She’s no Nanny to me,” said Cordelia in bitter repudiation. “Veronica
+Lawrence is very fond of children,” she added rapidly. “She said she’d
+take me for a walk any day. But I’m not so much interested in Veronica
+Lawrence.”
+
+“Then you’re an ungrateful little wretch,” said Sydney. “Run along!”
+
+“Do you promise, _some day_?” said the child despairingly.
+
+“Very well, I promise.”
+
+After another long stare that was at once ardent and sardonic Cordelia
+with reluctant steps and backward glances went after her family. Sydney
+heard her calling Nanny a devil. But so long as Cordelia came on, Nanny,
+who was a broken woman, cared for none of these things.
+
+Sydney, who knew that Mrs. Kerr was all this time sitting on her
+balcony, never more accessible than to-day in a coloured mood which the
+carnations were soon to reflect, still delayed luxuriously. She
+heightened the sweetness of exile by telling herself how soon the
+freshness of her carnations would be over, and how at any moment Mrs.
+Kerr might fall asleep for the afternoon, or get up and go out with
+somebody else. She even played with a regret at having packed off
+Cordelia with whom she might have walked back still more slowly through
+the town.
+
+When she did at last return to the Hotel the afternoon post had just
+come in and was spread out on the concierge’s table. There was nothing
+for herself but a letter for Mrs. Kerr in Ronald’s large untidy writing
+caught her eye suddenly. She hesitated for a moment at this, for she had
+not yet directly tried conclusions with Ronald; then, very confident of
+her balance, took the letter up with her and tapped lightly with the
+corner of the envelope on Mrs. Kerr’s door.
+
+Sydney knew at once from her friend’s unconscious air and rather marked
+immobility that she had been suspected. The carnations, into which
+virtue seemed to have gone out of herself, were at this anticipated
+moment difficult to relinquish. She laid them down with a degree of
+awkwardness across the end of the sofa. Mrs. Kerr, who sat with her feet
+up, looking out at the sea exclaimed: “Carnations!” incredulously as
+though this were what she had been longing for, and with an
+unprecedented movement held up her face to be kissed.
+
+“Will you put them in water?” she said, having looked at the flowers
+with wistful delight for a moment or two, and Sydney with a feeling of
+surprise that she could not explain to herself glanced round her, then
+began to arrange the carnations. She chose for the purpose a rather
+self-conscious-looking pottery mug that had been a present from Miss
+Pym. She arranged the flowers deliberately, and Mrs. Kerr looked on in
+expressive silence.
+
+“Pleased?” said Sydney.
+
+“Very, very much. I had been feeling like that: it was uncanny of you.
+Now they are perfect, Sydney; leave them alone and don’t keep fussing
+round them.”
+
+“That was because I want them to look nice all round. I’m not restless.”
+
+“No?” said Mrs. Kerr, revolving critically a possible new version of her
+friend which she seemed slow to accept.
+
+“No, I am not. I have a capacity for being still that left to myself I
+would never have doubted, but that no one else, you specially, will ever
+let me believe in. Look—” she knelt down where she stood, then sat back
+and arranged herself, leaning her side and elbow against the side of the
+sofa. “I could stay like this for the rest of the afternoon,” said
+Sydney.
+
+“Well, then stay still. Why should I disturb you?”
+
+“You will, you are bound to—Just now: where did you think I had gone?”
+
+“I was not allowed to think. I went out there and looked over the
+balcony, and that clergyman, that Mr. Milton, was walking about in the
+garden. He took off his hat and waved it to attract my attention. Then
+he began to talk for some time in the friendliest way.”
+
+“Really? That was excessive of him. What did he say?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I couldn’t hear. I just smiled and
+nodded. He is a cheerful, unselfconscious person. I like him.”
+
+“Unselfconscious? He feels spikes everywhere and is driven to impale
+himself. But I feel an interest in him; he told Veronica Lawrence he
+admired me.”
+
+“Very appealing of him. And so wise.”
+
+“Wise—to tell?”
+
+“No—to admire. Have many people, Sydney?”
+
+Sydney flashed round at her, startled into a brilliant flush. “I don’t
+know: I’ve never been sure of it.”
+
+“Never mind,” said Mrs. Kerr, staring out at her friend from some
+profound reverie, “when you look like that, the question answers
+itself.”
+
+“I suppose,” said Sydney, after an instant’s reflection, “that
+extraordinary people do. Cordelia Barry—or did you only mean men?”
+
+“No, I didn’t mean men. Don’t be so fearfully on the defensive—or do you
+think I am likely to match-make?”
+
+“I am sorry, that was horribly vulgar of me. It is so much easier to be
+vulgar and so much less noticed. I mean, you and I are supposed to
+assume, or to seem everywhere to assume, that that man down in the
+garden could be more to either of us than the other. Also, one has had
+it so ground into one that admiration, any exercise of the spirit is
+only valuable to its object, to drive somebody’s mill.”
+
+“Exercise of the spirit ...” said Mrs. Kerr, while Sydney listened like
+a stranger to this repetition of her own words. “If you call it that you
+must agree that it would be allowed some other value, even popularly:
+the value of a gymnastic.”
+
+“Oh, Shaw’s Englishman and his moral gymnasium; yes, I know,” said
+Sydney scornfully.
+
+“Now there you are, Sydney, you’ve moved and you’ll say I disturbed you.
+Don’t be so out to suffer. Mr. Milton’s not the only person who runs on
+to spikes.”
+
+“Out to suffer,” said Sydney, looking down at herself as it were, from
+the height of her exaltation. “_Am_ I out to suffer?”
+
+“I feel that you are,” said Mrs. Kerr, and pressing her head further
+back into the cushions she looked at Sydney again in thoughtful silence.
+They could hear footsteps, perhaps James Milton’s, crunching the gravel
+below.
+
+“Well yes,” Mrs. Kerr said at last, “put it that way.—Sydney, isn’t that
+a letter for me, over there by the carnations? Isn’t it from Ronald?”
+
+“Yes, it is from Ronald. I brought it up with me but I forgot to give it
+to you. Do you want it now?” Mrs. Kerr was holding out her hand for the
+letter but Sydney did not seem to notice. “It’s a very fat letter; I
+expect it is his views on Germany. _Do_ you want to read it while I’m
+here?”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I think I ought to read it. Mothers do.”
+
+“That you know best, of course.” Sydney, rising to her knees, reached
+across the table for the letter, which she handed to Ronald’s mother.
+Mrs. Kerr put on what Sydney called “the Ronald expression” and began to
+read while Sydney watched her.
+
+“My little boy,” she said at last, “is coming here.”
+
+“Coming here?”
+
+“Yes, here. Coming to the Hotel.”
+
+Sydney, sitting quite still, remained blank for a moment and did not say
+anything. Then she got up and walked about the room which, crowded up
+with the glare of the afternoon, now appeared to be much constricted.
+She did not even wonder as usual whether Mrs. Kerr were waiting for her
+to speak or if she had forgotten her. She looked for some time at the
+ornaments on Mrs. Kerr’s dressing-table which had at one time, by their
+profusion, and meaningless and evident air of being appreciated, “dated”
+her friend for her inevitably. She glanced for a moment, but only as if
+to assure herself of its still being there, at the portrait of Ronald.
+
+Ronald, for the delectation of some circle of friends as to whose extent
+and nature she had never speculated, had posed for one of those
+expensive photographers who specialize in portraits of men. A
+disposition of the prevalent shadows with one fierce escape of light on
+to the jaw and temple combine with the Promethean glitter of an eyeball
+to bring about an effect of fine ruggedness, of an elemental something
+curbed. Each copy of this photograph, a sepia matt, must have cost
+Ronald about a guinea. Sydney turned away from it impatiently. “Why on
+earth,” she asked, “isn’t Ronald up at Oxford now?”
+
+She had to wait for an answer until Mrs. Kerr having glanced back to an
+earlier page of the letter and smiled to herself over something, perhaps
+an inconsistency she had detected, had folded up the thin sheets
+casually and let them slide from the sofa to the floor.
+
+“What did you say, Sydney? Ah yes, Oxford. He thought it would be better
+to travel for a time, you see, after leaving school. He wanted to expand
+again, he said, and he wished particularly though I cannot think why, to
+spend a year in Germany. He would have preferred to go to Heidelberg,
+but his guardian wouldn’t hear of it, unfortunately. So he is going up
+to Oxford in the autumn, I believe.”
+
+“I suppose he won’t mind being older than the people in his year?”
+
+“I suppose not,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I should have thought it was a pity.
+However, I know very little about boys of that age. He will be twenty
+soon.”
+
+“An impossible age,” said Sydney.
+
+“I suppose it really is,” agreed Mrs. Kerr.
+
+Sydney had by this time made up her mind that their future must not be
+devastated by a descent upon them of Ronald. She looked about her
+undecidedly, not certain whether to say “This is very generous of him”
+with irony, or, without irony, but with a display of emotion sure to be
+distasteful, “Oh, this is lovely for you; I am ever so glad,” or “It
+will be interesting to see you together,” with an implication of
+detachment and of relegating her friend to maternity. She could not
+guess to which of these observations Mrs. Kerr would be likely to react
+most desirably, and she felt herself embarrassed by a lack of insight
+into her friend’s personality, of which she had always been conscious,
+but which had till now added charm to their intercourse. Now that she
+might have to come to grips with the hypothetical mother in Mrs. Kerr
+she realized that she was powerless to estimate the force and scope of
+relationship of being to being; from consideration of which, as of
+something out of proportion with life as she saw it, she had always
+withheld herself.
+
+Mrs. Kerr, her hands behind her head, gazed delightedly at the future.
+“How very nice,” she laughed, “how very nice and amusing.... Oh no,
+don’t laugh like that, Sydney; why should it seem funny to you? It’s
+very natural, only it’s so funny that we—he and I—never seem to have
+happened to be together in a place where there was nothing to look at
+and no one to visit and nowhere to go. So that I suppose one might
+almost say we have never been together—It is absurd for me to laugh,”
+she went on, in a glow of amused speculation, “but I’m so touched; it is
+so ridiculously touching of him. Fancy him writing like that and wanting
+to come, from _Dresden_.... I wonder where he will sleep: we must find
+him somewhere to sleep—I think that will be all right, don’t you,
+Sydney?”
+
+“Have I been very dense?” asked Sydney, in a tone strange to herself. “I
+do not even seem to have realized you missed him, or thought of him
+much, or would be glad if he came.”
+
+“But I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking back at the past in surprise,
+“that I didn’t realize it either.”
+
+“_Has_ it been lonely and dull? They all said it must be lonely and dull
+for you, but I never——”
+
+“Oh no, Sydney dear. You’ve made such a difference.”
+
+“Have I?” Sydney said hungrily. Mrs. Kerr nodded; she was enclosed in
+her thoughts but this gleam of affection emboldened Sydney to ask, with
+a desperate directness, “And do you want him now—you are fearfully
+glad?”
+
+“Sydney, you really are too clever sometimes to understand me. Can’t I
+be glad?”
+
+Sydney felt herself beaten back by something that in spite of nature’s
+whole precedent she knew for a falsity; an imposture which her
+immaturity sensed but could not challenge. She knelt down again in
+bewildered, still angry submission by the side of her friend. “Of course
+I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be glad. On the other hand you know that
+to me the conventions don’t seem to fit you, and bar the conventions,
+why should I _assume_ that you are? You see, I’m not a mother and I
+don’t know any mothers well.”
+
+She allowed herself to be reconquered as Mrs. Kerr, putting a hand out
+and vaguely caressing her hair, said thoughtfully, “No, you aren’t and
+you don’t; that’s quite true. Well, won’t you be generous enough to take
+me for granted?”
+
+
+
+
+                                   X
+
+
+For James Milton, after his first few days in the Hotel, everybody with
+whom he had exchanged a word or a glance or been brought even indirectly
+into contact had already divided themselves into his friends or enemies.
+Those who had not yet detached themselves hung about the outskirts of
+his consciousness as a kind of mist behind which threatening
+possibilities were for ever stirring, could be glimpsed for an instant,
+then subsided. He suffered, as he did at last confess to himself, and
+began to wonder why he had ever left his parish, where the crippling
+sensitiveness of his childhood had at least been deadened by the
+activity of every day, and where in the assured retreat of office he had
+had no need to question what he was. But the place was beautiful and
+completely satisfied him once he had been able to reconcile what he saw
+with what he had imagined and to recognize that while an ultimate
+Riviera could only have existence in the mind of God, this was as fair
+an imitation as it was reasonable to expect. He walked for the allied
+pleasures of coloured experience and of hardening his muscles, he tried
+to talk Italian to natives, to be answered incomprehensibly in patois or
+the local French; he played tennis not so badly and was to be surprised,
+in consequence, by the friendliness of the Lawrences, and he admitted to
+some vague attractions which it entertained him to discuss with himself.
+
+He became friendly, comfortably and without attraction, with Miss
+Fitzgerald and Miss Pym. These two in spite of their experience of
+clergymen could not “place” him. From his moustache, one would have been
+inclined to take him for an Evangelical, on the other hand, it is
+Anglicans who step with fewest scruples into secular clothes. He had
+attended the conferences of neither party and remained irresponsive to
+the shibboleths of both. Miss Pym wrote, on an inspiration, to ask
+particulars of him from that friend in Derbyshire that he and she had
+early discovered to be mutual. But the friend in Derbyshire was an
+Anglo-Catholic and did not acknowledge the finer shades; she simply
+wrote back that he was a delightful man, adding a string of messages for
+him that gave no key. Colonel Duperrier also liked Milton; they
+exchanged stories about fishing in Donegal, discussed Europe and
+respected one another’s reserve. The Lawrences made him an apple-pie bed
+and used to send him suggestive Italian picture postcards anonymously to
+see how much he would stand.
+
+But he was still avid for popularity. Though devoid of the more odious
+kinds of vanity, he had been given to understand that as an unattached,
+personable man he would be _persona grata_ anywhere: and he was troubled
+to find that this was not the case. He had avoided Sydney since that day
+of the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic: for some reason that he could not explain
+it was impossible to think of her without embarrassment, though at times
+she was nothing more to him than some curious picture whose worth he
+could apprehend but felt unable to analyse. It was with some unavowed
+idea of a circuitous approach to Sydney that he sought out her friend
+Mrs. Kerr; preparing to find himself to a degree, but not beyond that
+degree, disturbed by her.
+
+He was oppressed by some patent hostilities.
+
+“I am afraid,” he said to Miss Fitzgerald, as during the half-hour
+before lunch they sat together in the Hotel garden on iron chairs under
+an orange tree, “that I have done something to offend Mrs. Pinkerton.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t see how you could have. Anyhow, she’s a fearful old snob,”
+said Miss Fitzgerald, who knew all about the bathroom, but had neither
+the face nor the heart to tell him.
+
+“Oh, do you think so? She is the sort of old lady I have so often been
+asked to lunch with that I cannot help wondering why we do not get on.”
+
+“She is the patroness of a living——”
+
+“Well, I don’t want the woman’s living,” said Milton indignantly. “Does
+she think I’m going to pick her pocket for it?”
+
+“How ridiculous you are!” laughed Miss Fitzgerald, who was exhilarated
+by violence. “You know, she would make a splendid Lady Catherine de
+Bourgh.”
+
+“Ye-es,” said Milton thoughtfully, wondering who should be his
+Charlotte. He resumed, “Another person I should like an explanation with
+is Mr. Lee-Mittison. He took me up a mountain my first day here, lost me
+and has been looking daggers at me ever since. He seems to have forgiven
+the Lawrences and Miss Warren who were equally his victims, and I cannot
+see why I am singled out. After all, I was stranger to the hills than
+any of them.”
+
+“I am very sorry for his wife,” said Miss Fitzgerald sighing
+pleasurably.
+
+“I don’t know. I think he’s her fault. She mayn’t seem a very buoyant
+woman but I don’t suppose she’d like to be.”
+
+“It’s very curious,” said Miss Fitzgerald, turning to look at him, “most
+men, I have noticed are hardest on men but with you it seems just the
+opposite. I don’t know whether it’s personal prejudice—” she sweetened
+the impertinence with a smile—“or the curious sombre rigidity of some
+old school of thought; perhaps Pauline?”
+
+“I can’t think,” Milton said vaguely. At this particular hour of the
+morning he did not want to talk about himself and was still less
+interested in St. Paul.
+
+“Perhaps,” she suggested, “you are brought too much into contact with
+women, the tiresome type. A clergyman’s life——”
+
+“It never really strikes me that there’s very much difference. I mean
+there _are_ a certain rather limited _number_ of ways in which people
+can be idiotic—or if you like, wicked—and men and women seem to fall
+into them indiscriminately. It always irritates me to see anybody being
+bolstered up in their own particular kind of insufferableness by the
+friend who ought to be helping them, and I do think women (for their own
+ends, which makes it unpardonable) are worse about doing this than men.
+If that’s what you mean by my being severer on women? Otherwise I can’t
+see that in my department at any rate, men and women are noticeably
+different.”
+
+“Or in any department,” said Miss Fitzgerald earnestly rallying to her
+standard. “And it interested me to hear you use the word ‘friend’ in
+that context. Meaning that friend and husband—or wife, as the case may
+be—should be synonymous.”
+
+“Practically,” said Milton, looking round and wondering whether it would
+be possible to order an apéritif, and wishing since he feared this was
+not possible, that he had gone down to the town. “I suppose,” he
+continued conscientiously though with a slight effort, “that you think I
+am intolerant?”
+
+“Oh no, not that: too, too acute.... One feels it a disadvantage. I
+suppose one is oneself too much in the habit of _generalizing_.” She
+broke off and reached up suddenly in apparent confusion to pluck a
+small, still rather sickly orange from a branch above her. This, without
+looking at it again, she bit, right into the peel.
+
+“Surely that is rather bitter?” asked James Milton looking on
+solicitously.
+
+“Yes,” said she with a wry face, wiping her mouth, “it was very bitter!”
+She turned crimson and began to laugh awkwardly. “Such an extraordinary
+thing to do: I _do_ do extraordinary things sometimes ... without
+thinking ... when I’m thinking hard.”
+
+James Milton, who did think this was an extraordinary thing to have
+done, was silent. She glanced shamefacedly at her tooth marks in the
+orange, then guiltily up at the windows of the Hotel, then she wiped the
+orange and tucked it quietly away behind her.
+
+“Look!” cried out James Milton considerately. “There’s Mrs. Kerr again,
+out on her balcony.”
+
+“So she is—how nice she looks up there. You know, my friend Miss Pym is
+so fond of her, she says she is marvellously sympathetic. She is
+certainly an unusual woman, but so very charming. She is very much
+criticized here by a certain set, but then I am afraid some women have
+very small minds. Did you hear, her son is coming out next week? We are
+so glad, it will be delightful for her.”
+
+“I say, is he really? I’m glad.”
+
+“We are wondering,” continued Miss Fitzgerald, “what he and Sydney
+Warren will say to each other?”
+
+“Really?” said James Milton, whose mind had leapt at once to this.
+
+“Not of course that I mean anything ... well, you know, sentimentally.
+The boy is hardly grown up. No, I mean she has been so much in
+possession, really rather monopolizing Mrs. Kerr, who of course is
+incapable of not being nice to anybody and is so patient and sympathetic
+and good.” Miss Fitzgerald sighed “She’s been victimized....”
+
+Later on, when Milton had followed Miss Fitzgerald into the dining-room,
+he stared with renewed curiosity at the back of Miss Warren’s head
+across the dining-room, as though he expected the shape and colour of
+her to be somehow different, or expected her to disclose her whole self
+to him in some gesture or attitude. He sat at his lonely table crumbling
+his bread exaltedly and wondering how soon Ronald could possibly arrive.
+He promised himself that, if Ronald were not delayed, it would be
+possible for him in a fortnight or even ten days to know Sydney
+absolutely. Then he had to recollect how unfriendly to him she had shown
+herself and wonder whether being thrown back on his society would tend
+to make her like him better. Tessa’s bright vague eyes surprised him in
+their wandering, he smiled and nodded.
+
+“Mr. Milton keeps on looking at us,” whispered Tessa to Sydney. “I do
+wonder what he wants.”
+
+Many people who admired Mrs. Kerr had already congratulated her; others
+who had still to do so sought her out as they streamed from the
+dining-room. A small crowd gathered about her as she stood in the
+doorway, like a tall bride, confused and elated. Many who did not like
+her at all had also congratulated, as they were anxious to see how she
+was taking it. “Splendid!” shouted and smiled Mr. Milton over the
+intervening heads; his long, rather pink face also towering.
+
+“Yes, it’s splendid, isn’t it?” agreed Sydney from behind him. She was
+jostled against him all at once by more people pushing out from the
+dining-room and he said, putting out a hand to steady her: “I’m sure
+_you_ must be glad?”
+
+At the end of that afternoon’s tennis he waited for Sydney and walked up
+with her from the club. “This young man, this Ronald,” he asked, “do you
+know him?”
+
+“I feel I do,” said Sydney. “Mrs. Kerr has shown me his letters and she
+laughs at me occasionally and says I am like him. And there is a
+photograph, anyway, that one couldn’t help noticing. Altogether I feel
+he is to be a kind of comic character.”
+
+“Oh! Does his mother think he is funny?” said James Milton, slightly
+jarred.
+
+“But young people are always funny: as we get more sophisticated we
+can’t help realizing that ourselves—I don’t know whether that makes us
+less funny or more so.”
+
+The sun had dipped to the line of the hills, so that the sky had a kind
+of gold sparkle which reflected itself on figures and faces. Even before
+the moment of sunset the air was already tingling with cold; the dark
+keen upstanding trees about them seemed slightly to shiver. Sydney flung
+the folds of her white fleecy cloak across her breast and holding them
+gathered against her paused a moment, looking back towards the
+tennis-courts with a wild Beatrice Cenci expression which did not
+correspond with her thoughts and of which she was wholly unconscious.
+Milton’s heart leapt to his mouth for that moment, then he felt the
+chill of dusk lay an ice-cold hand on him and he shuddered. He asked her
+impatiently if she were waiting for anyone else.
+
+She said “No” in surprise, and walked beside him up the path to the
+Hotel, treading noiselessly in her rope-soled shoes. “It is an alarming
+idea,” said he, unable to maintain a silence of whose peculiar quality
+he became intolerably conscious, “that the young should be getting
+progressively more and more sophisticated. It is as bad as it is to be
+told, if one is a reader of adventure stories, that no part of dark
+Africa remains undiscovered, and that one-inch maps of all parts will be
+available shortly.”
+
+“I suppose it would be, if one ever seriously considered youth
+romantic.”
+
+“But I never said _I_ did. Romantic—I’m not that kind of middle-aged
+man. When I compared it to Africa, I didn’t mean I liked Africa; I
+dislike the thoughts of the wilds intensely but they make me so
+appreciative of the state of civilization in which I am living that I
+should be sorry if they disappeared.”
+
+“So you feel civilized?” said Sydney, beginning to like him. Till now
+she had been discouraged by his facile (what she called “professional”)
+manner and by a middle-aged whimsicality reeking of the Barrie play.
+
+“Much more so,” said James Milton, cursing himself for going on like
+this, and for that very manner and habit of mind of his, of which no one
+else could have been more contemptuously aware.
+
+“More than whom?” said Sydney idly, but he refused to continue and she
+allowed him with unusual complaisance to swing her with him into a new
+mood, as though they had been a pair of dancers. The rocky crest of a
+hill to the east, at a great height, had suddenly been ribbed with
+scarlet. This vivid colour against the profound and quickly darkening
+sky was to northern eyes a challenge to credulity: and Sydney looking up
+with admiration and hostility, said, “I should never have believed it.”
+
+“I have always believed it,” said James Milton, “but it is surprising to
+see.”
+
+“You’ll see a hundred others,” she told him: and they hurried on,
+discussing in relation to this line of coast the phenomena of sunset.
+When they had come out into the road they walked more slowly between the
+lines of chestnut-trees, watching the light fade from the enormous faces
+of the hotels and retreat even from the villas above, which though
+suffused in dusk still glimmered. Night had arrived, as usual, with the
+catastrophic suddenness which does not for a long time cease to be
+alarming. They could hear forgotten windows being slammed indignantly,
+while lights springing up behind the curtains brought them out in
+hundreds in their uniformity, with here and there a figure passing
+regularly as a pendulum to and fro across the screen of lace. The hill
+smoked over with olives loomed, by some _trompe-l’oeil_ of the twilight
+seemed to topple, above the larger hotels; but their own in silhouette
+against the sea stood out as they approached it in greater significance.
+
+She said, “I have often thought it would be interesting if the front of
+any house, but of an hotel especially, could be swung open on a hinge
+like the front of a doll’s-house. Imagine the hundreds of rooms with
+their walls lit up and the real-looking staircases and all the people
+surprised doing appropriate things in appropriate attitudes as though
+they had been put there to represent something and had never moved in
+their lives. Like the cook-doll that I always had propped up against the
+kitchen stove and the father-doll propped against the library
+book-shelves and the sitting-up doll in the bath that was really a china
+ornament and had no other attitude, and the limp dolls that wouldn’t do
+anything so had to be kept in the spare room beds, which I always think
+was an unconscious reflection on the ideal habits for visitors.”
+
+“Yes,” said James Milton, for whom the Hotel was at once in miniature.
+“If one could see people all at once like that they wouldn’t matter so
+much.” Quite apart from and yet somehow parallel with the intellectual
+conception he had another idea of God, of which he permitted himself to
+be conscious, as an enormous and perpetually descending Finger and
+Thumb. What Sydney had just said fitted in with this alarmingly.
+
+“If one could see them like that,” she continued, “one could see them so
+clearly, as living under the compulsion of their furniture—or the
+furniture they happen to have hired. It would seem very doubtful, I
+daresay, whether man were not, after all, made for the Sabbath—and
+worse, for beds and dinner-tables and washstands, just to discharge the
+obligations all those have created.”
+
+“I don’t think I should ever believe that,” said Milton amused.
+
+“Well, even you,” she continued. “Though it may have been an Idea in the
+first place that made churches to be built, it was the churches already
+existing, with rows of pews for people to sit in, and a pulpit and
+things all ready that had to be filled, that made you into a parson.”
+
+“I’m afraid I don’t agree with you at all,” said he, with a finality
+that impressed her.
+
+“It really isn’t worth disagreeing with: I was only talking for the fun
+of the thing. Of course I don’t believe that more than anything else.”
+They had been walking under the windows of their own Hotel, and she now
+paused in the gateway with the light from the Hotel door streaming out
+on to her looking at him remotely, as a gypsy might look over the
+garden-fence at a householder mowing his lawn. “I daresay,” her look
+seemed to say, “that in your encumbered kind of way you are happy. I am
+not, in any way, and I don’t want to be.” It was with this air at once
+complacent and desolate that she seemed proposing to part from him, for
+she glanced at her wrist-watch, murmured something in the nature of a
+farewell and slipped on ahead.
+
+“Oh, I say!” exclaimed Milton helplessly, and racked his brains for
+something further to say to her.
+
+“What?” asked Sydney looking down from the steps and with faint
+impatience swinging her racket.
+
+“I hope you don’t think I was offended?” said he wildly.
+
+“No. Why should you be?”
+
+“What you said about churches ... I was afraid you might have thought——”
+
+“Well,” said Sydney, “it’s no use trying not to offend people so I don’t
+think I ever think much one way or the other. I’ve given up listening
+agonizedly for the possible reverberations of every remark—which, if
+you’ll forgive my saying so, I think you do.”
+
+“I’m sorry,” said he, with the humility of twenty years’ seniority.
+
+“Oh, it doesn’t matter a bit. Good-night.” He had pulled open the swing
+door for her and she passed through it ahead of him, trailing her cloak
+which had slipped away from her shoulders. He gathered up the fringe of
+this from the floor and passed it to her. “Why good-night?” said he, and
+several people sitting about the lounge looked up in astonishment. “I
+mean, don’t we see each other at dinner?”
+
+“Oh well, of course we see each other at dinner.” Sydney glanced round
+the lounge, took note of the astonished faces and, after another slight
+bow to Milton, went upstairs slowly, humming a tune.
+
+
+
+
+                                   XI
+
+
+On the night of Ronald’s arrival a dance was taking place in the Hotel
+dining-room. Chairs and tables had been stacked away in one corner, the
+floor polished and the walls festooned with paper flags and specially
+illuminated. The music audible in every part of the Hotel, though
+generally as a sustained thin humming with the pianist’s undertone as an
+irregular and tuneless pulse-beat, had drawn everybody; lounge and
+drawing-room had been drained of their usual occupants. Dances at the
+Hotel were not usual and this was in the nature of a gala night. The
+concierge’s face was wreathed in smiles but Ronald felt his manner
+lacked _empressement_. It was irritating, when one had enquired for
+one’s mother, to be told with an appearance of indifference that she too
+would be also at the ball. He had been sustained till now by the
+brilliant certainty of being expected and waited for, but he was tired
+after the journey and the lounge from which the palms had all been taken
+away to decorate the dining-room did now seem repellent, mean and
+artificial.
+
+“Tell my mother I have come,” he said to the concierge and sat down in a
+wicker-chair while the dance music throbbed at him. The concierge went
+away but nobody came, though he waited; so at last he walked over to the
+dining-room door and, unable to see anything through the blind but
+twirling forms and wavering shadows, opened the door sharply and
+surveyed the scene from the threshold.
+
+It must be admitted that the impressions he received were coloured for
+him by a prejudice against the Riviera which he had cultivated from his
+childhood and believed to be innate.
+
+Veronica Lawrence was the first to remark and point out to her partner
+that a young man, probably Ronald Kerr, was standing in the doorway. She
+was wearing a tight green dress like a sheath and every time she passed
+she looked thoughtfully at Ronald over her partner’s shoulder and once
+even smiled. Girls and young men had been asked in from the other hotels
+and the floor was crowded, while a close-packed row of onlookers sat or
+stood along the walls, pressing up so near to the band that the
+red-coated fiddlers began to look desperate, having scarcely elbow-room.
+The sexes were unequally represented, several couples of girls were
+dancing together. Some of the elder ladies had also taken the floor and
+were spinning round at a high velocity in the arms of their usual
+bridge-partners whose coat-tails whirled horizontally to the constant
+danger of more modern dancers whose poised totterings, hesitations and
+smooth forward rushes they perpetually interrupted.
+
+“He’s _rather_ decorative,” said Veronica. She had at last elicited a
+bow from Ronald, who felt convinced that the girl must know him.
+
+“Oh well,” said Victor coldly, “if you like ’em floppy—” He set his jaw
+again and silent as ever they flitted across a pool of floor that opened
+for them, light as moths above their shadows. The Lawrences were
+remarkable everywhere with their burnished hair brushed up into haloes;
+they trailed enormous feather fans across their partners’ shoulders
+negligently, and refused to waltz with elderly men, though they would
+make an exception in favour of Colonel Duperrier.
+
+Mrs. Duperrier sat against one of the walls, following couple after
+couple round with her eyes. Now and again she would smile metallically
+at a girl she knew and ask her whether she were having a good time.
+Though she never seemed to be watching Colonel Duperrier she knew where
+he was all the time and could have pointed him out immediately. She had
+trained herself to remember distinctly whichever scene from her past had
+at the moment most torturous significance for her; now she could see
+herself at nineteen, admired to satiation, waltzing with a Captain
+Duperrier at Darjeeling. A French window stood open on to a balcony
+whence steps led down into the black-dark garden; couples dived in and
+out of the window perpetually and presently Mrs. Duperrier who had been
+expecting this the whole evening saw her husband disappear with one of
+the Lawrences and waited in vain for him to come back. Mr. Lee-Mittison,
+who had been working his way round the room, bumped down beside her
+abruptly with his hands on his parted knees.
+
+“I hope you agree with me that our girls are doing us credit? There
+isn’t a girl in the room that can hold a candle to one of the Lawrences;
+Sydney Warren’s looking very distinguished (—I can’t honestly tell you I
+care for this thing they’re all dancing—) and even the little Bransomes
+light up well. Mark my word——”
+
+Mrs. Duperrier suddenly felt she could not bear this, made a queer
+little sound and shot up from her place. After one last look through the
+window she pushed her way between the dancers and out of the
+dining-room. She passed Ronald Kerr in the doorway and looked at him in
+amazement, then rushed past him and shut herself up in her room.
+
+Sydney wore a scarlet dress and danced as though she had for once
+forgotten herself. A young Italian whose name she did not know had
+attached himself to her and she divided her dances between him and
+Colonel Duperrier and a gingery Captain Somebody-or-other from another
+hotel who thought her conversation smart and giggled ecstatically. The
+Italian danced, as Veronica afterwards said, “like a seraphim”: he
+taught Sydney the tango as it is danced in Rome, and it was while she
+was standing balanced against him to the slow music that she looked
+sideways and saw or rather for the first time apprehended Ronald: she
+realized that he must have been there some time.
+
+Cold all over and for a moment lost to the tango she thought: “Ronald!”
+then returned her eyes to her partner’s dispassionate face and slid her
+long step sideways across him; they both swung half round and balanced
+again at the conclusion of the bar. The floor was emptier; all but a few
+couples had been driven off it by the unnatural music; the remaining few
+were visible from every part of the room and were reflected in the
+twirling mirror. Ronald was watching her, and before the end of the
+dance she excused herself to her partner and crossed the room to speak
+to him.
+
+“I beg your pardon—aren’t you Mr. Kerr?”
+
+“I am,” said Ronald gloomily.
+
+“Surely you have come early? Mrs. Kerr was not expecting you——”
+
+“Oh thanks, but I happen to know my mother _is_ expecting me.”
+
+“—not expecting you before half past eleven,” said Sydney, finishing her
+sentence imperturbably. “The Paris train——”
+
+“Excuse me, but I didn’t come from Paris. I’ve come from Genoa.”
+
+“Really? You see you never said how you were coming, so we rather
+assumed——”
+
+Ronald’s long stare plainly enquired what right she had had to have
+“rather assumed”; and more, what she could know about his mother’s
+assumptions. It was diverted from Sydney by the arrival of Mr.
+Lee-Mittison who hurried towards them, skidding slightly in his
+eagerness on the polished floor. “Can _I_ do anything for you, my boy?”
+said Mr. Lee-Mittison.
+
+“Well, yes,” said Ronald turning towards him. “I am looking for Mrs.
+Kerr who happens to be my mother. Perhaps you will be able to tell me
+where——”
+
+“Mr. Lee-Mittison will certainly be able to help you,” said Sydney; she
+and Ronald bowed to one another and she walked away. “To the knife,” she
+thought, surrendering herself to her next partner, the gingery captain,
+who had waited meanwhile in the offing. In the succession of broken
+glimpses she had of him subsequently she saw Ronald being led round the
+edge of the room by Mr. Lee-Mittison, who had laid a hand on his
+shoulder, with bowed head, but with every sign of complaisance to being
+Mr. Lee-Mittison’s boy. After a few minutes’ conversation they left the
+lounge together. Their exit was watched with an equal interest by James
+Milton, who thought: “So that’s what Ronald is going to be like.”
+
+Milton had spent the evening propped against the empty fireplace wishing
+he could dance. The high mantelpiece caught uncomfortably just between
+the shoulders, giving him a slight stoop forward. He was dissatisfied,
+but did not wish to take a seat along the walls among the women and the
+very old gentlemen. The men of his age were all dancing and his
+isolation irked him, yet he could not tear himself away from the music
+and the lit-up, hypnotizing circulation of the dancers. He had noticed
+Ronald at once and wondered whether he ought to go across and speak to
+him, but there was something about Ronald at once remote and ominous
+which forbade the hazards of so public an encounter. He resembled, in
+the cool wide stare across which the dancers were allowed to sweep while
+it never singled out or followed any of them, in the backward tilt of
+the head which sent the stare down over the modelled protrusion of
+cheekbones, and in a droop down at the corners of the mouth that
+lengthened the chin, a supercilious young Florentine among the retinue
+of the Magi who stands apart and Gallio-like on its fringe, staring out
+of the picture. Ronald was, however, never at any one moment entirely
+superb; he could achieve a slouch in any attitude and the lock of hair
+tumbling slantwise across his forehead towards one eyebrow broke up the
+design of his features into something irregular and rather baffled.
+There was a glitter about him which betrayed an embarrassing
+cropping-out of the Shelley from behind the mask of Hellenic remoteness
+so carefully worn.
+
+“Snubbed!” smiled James Milton, watching Sydney with a swirl of the red
+skirts turn on her heel and return to her partner. The only sentiments
+she did not at present arouse in him were those of protectiveness and
+pity. His own sensitiveness, however, made him turn away from looking at
+her at this crisis of discomfiture, and he caught instead the eye of
+Eileen Lawrence who, disconcerted at finding herself without a partner,
+was advancing towards him with the undulations of a Spanish dancer. She
+looked in her bright black so very striking, so very unlike the sort of
+young woman over whom he had even permitted his imagination to linger,
+that he was gratified at her coming up to strike an attitude before him.
+She said with a glance which in spite of his armour of subtlety did
+elate and disturb him: “Now then, Mr. Milton, you’re very diffident:
+aren’t you going to dance with me?”
+
+“There’s nothing I should like better, but I _don’t_, unfortunately.”
+
+“Oh, tut,” said Eileen. “But what a relief—I had been afraid we weren’t
+beautiful enough for you. Very well then, take me out for a stroll in
+the garden.”
+
+“_Rather_,” said Mr. Milton, coming forward with alacrity. “But won’t
+you be cold?” Though he did not mind this at all, he could not help
+noticing that she had less on than he could have imagined possible. She
+did not answer, only lashed her feather fan to and fro in a contemptuous
+gesture; so he said no more and followed her through the window.
+
+The Hotel garden, though not large, had been so laid out with screens of
+trees and with circuitous paths as to afford visitors the maximum of
+variety and exercise. It had taken on this evening from the insistent
+music and from the light that splashed down on to the trees a character
+so unusual, so vivid yet unearthly, that James Milton could hardly
+recognize it for the place of gravel and thin foliage where some days
+ago he had been talking to Miss Fitzgerald on an iron chair. There was
+no moon, but the sky was pale with starshine. “I suppose,” said Eileen
+Lawrence after a few moments, sniffing, “that this is what they’d call
+in books ‘a balmy and languorous southern night.’”
+
+“It certainly smells good. Perhaps the lemon trees....”
+
+“‘A night made for love,’ that’s what they’d call it.”
+
+“I suppose they would ... I say, are you certain you’re not cold?”
+
+She had shivered, but at this delightful thought: “A night when men go
+out with guns and shoot themselves on the Casino terrace—Heavens, if
+this were Monte!”
+
+“But it certainly _is_ the Riviera,” said James Milton, and he thought
+of the whole band of white hotels like palaces along the line of coast
+into which their own seemed now to be knitted, hotels with light
+streaming out of them towards the tideless sea that never advancing on
+the shore or receding from it was like an inexorable unfailing memory,
+not worked upon by thought or changed by sleep. “The Church Militant,”
+he thought ridiculously; then stared at a conviction which had stared at
+him that there could be no closer One-ness than in this community of
+desire and emotion, and that perhaps in this alone consisted....
+
+Eileen Lawrence brushed against him as they turned a corner.
+
+“What jolly arms you’ve got,” he, feeling still immeasurably far from
+her, was moved to exclaim.
+
+They strolled together amicably, following the doublings and twists of
+the path, meeting or overtaking other couples and overhearing now and
+then some scrap of conversation, some interchange of personalities from
+behind a screen of trees or the depths of an occasional arbour. Their
+cigarette ends glowing and fading preceded them like a pair of luminous
+noses, and equidistant spots of light advertised that pairs of other
+Dongs were promenading solemnly. “How ridiculous!” laughed James Milton
+at the music, in sudden elation. He had not been to a dance for years,
+he had forsaken even Christmas parties because they made him feel
+avuncular: all this was new to him. Eileen, who thought this was the
+dreariest dance she had ever been at, a travesty of all that was highest
+in human enjoyment, was as near depression as the Lawrences ever
+descended and replied: “Yes, it’s pretty futile, isn’t it? I suppose the
+dowagers are enjoying it. Shall we go in?”
+
+Milton who had been taking a keener pleasure than she understood in her
+nearness, in the intimacy of the darkness, actually laid a hand on her
+arm to detain her. He entreated, “Not till the end of this dance!”
+
+His unwillingness to give her up was not decreased by a sharp irritation
+that she with her white arms and her attractiveness (which he was
+conscious of as something as material as phosphorescence, in which he
+could have dipped a finger curiously) should have stopped short at being
+Eileen Lawrence. He was convinced that if she had been anybody else, say
+Sydney (now dancing, indifferent, in the room above) the situation would
+have had a key for him; and he chafed with an indignant longing. “I say,
+Eileen—” he began and determined to understand himself reached out a
+hand for her.
+
+“Well?” challenged Eileen, and they stared at the greyish blots of one
+another’s faces in the darkness. After a moment her expectancy broke up
+into laughter. “I really thought,” said she, “that you were going to
+kiss me.”
+
+“So did I,” said James Milton and following her back to the ball-room he
+tried in vain to decide whether she and the mood to which she had given
+colour had been base or very admirable. He gave her up to her next
+partner and returned to the fireplace, but the dance became meaningless;
+he could not see Sydney anywhere. Once he thought she appeared beyond
+the window, half in the darkness, but she was shut away from him by the
+spinning barrier. He determined to find her, to allay the restlessness
+which was beginning to sap his benignity and make him look with contempt
+at the older people and at the younger with resentment. If he did not
+find her soon he would begin to believe that there was not a place in
+the world for him—he started at a flash of red in one of the mirrors but
+it was only the sweep of Eileen’s crimson fan. He felt that he could no
+longer endure the ball-room and that even if by going he were to cut
+himself off for ever from all it contained he must leave it to look for
+her.
+
+He went out into the lounge with his heart in his mouth but there was no
+one there but Mr. Lee-Mittison, walking about and rubbing his hands, so
+happy that he had had to expand here himself in solitude.
+
+“Charming boy, that,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison. “Really an
+acquisition—charming boy.”
+
+“Indeed?” said Milton, who had forgotten Ronald.
+
+“Found his mother for him. Nice woman, very nice woman. Pretty to see
+’em together.” He beamed at Milton as he had not beamed for days.
+
+“Was it?” said Milton. He stared again round the emptiness of the
+lounge, went to the foot of the stairs and looked up, listened, and with
+a last desperate inspiration looked into the drawing-room.
+
+“Looking for anybody?” asked Mr. Lee-Mittison, observing this.
+
+“No,” said Milton and nodding good-night to Mr. Lee-Mittison he went
+down the basement stairs into the smoking-room and out by a glass door
+into the garden again. Here he walked to and fro, repelled by the
+darkness, peering angrily into the arbours which were now all empty and
+silent and quickening his steps at every turn of a path. He looked at
+the great sheer façade springing upright above him, where here and there
+a light came out in a window, and thought, “Of course, she is tired; she
+has gone up to bed.”
+
+“But she was not tired at all: she did not look as though she would ever
+sleep again,” his memory told him.
+
+“I suppose I must love her?—But I cannot, she is so erratic and cold—”
+“It is because she’s erratic and cold that you’ve been able to surprise
+your own feeling.” “Oh, rats!” said James Milton, kicking a stone. A
+figure that had come out on to one of the balconies started and peered
+down into the garden.
+
+The quick movement betrayed some high tension of fear or expectancy.
+Mrs. Kerr, he thought in surprise, as having counted the windows up from
+the ground and then along from left to right he located the balcony. Why
+should she still and in such wretchedness be waiting for Ronald? He
+listened and watched; the room behind her was empty. Then as the figure,
+still with its arms stretched out, gripping the balcony, turned its head
+sideways, he recognized Sydney. It was on the tip of his tongue to call
+to her, as though she were a child for whose conduct he was somehow
+responsible. She should have left them alone to-night, he thought, and
+flamed with disinterested anger. He took a few steps backward, propped
+himself against a tree and remained looking up at the balcony. She
+shivered; he shivered in sympathy. How much (though how properly) Mrs.
+Kerr had found to say to her son! It was long past midnight now and very
+cold, the dance was over and the music silent some time ago. All the
+other lights were out except one at the very top left-hand corner where
+Ronald and his mother must still be talking.
+
+“Damn Ronald!” thought James Milton. “She and I will be catching our
+deaths.” A clock down in the town struck the half-hour and a bell from a
+convent above them answered it. Emboldened by the breach these made in
+the silence he called, “Good-night, Miss Warren!”
+
+Sydney started violently and after one more fierce glance on to the
+trees retreated from the balcony. He saw her pause a moment under the
+light and look round as though to take a farewell of her expectations,
+then the room was dashed from his sight by darkness. A panel of fresh
+light shone for a moment as the door on to the corridor opened and shut.
+Sighing, and with a sense of half-accomplishment, he too went in to bed.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XII
+
+
+“Well,” Mrs. Kerr said expansively, meeting Sydney on the stairs next
+morning, “isn’t it _rather_ a nice puppy?”
+
+She was dressed to go out, with a blue straw hat pulled down over her
+eyes. She had paused with a hand out to steady herself against the frame
+of the staircase window, and the north light defined the smiling curve
+of one cheek and drew prismatic colours out of an earring. She was
+evidently very happy.
+
+“What puppy?” Sydney said blankly, looking up from a few steps below
+her.
+
+“My Ronald. Isn’t it _rather_ a nice——”
+
+“Oh very, yes. I thought it seemed a rather severe puppy last night but
+I daresay that was the journey.”
+
+“Oh, severe?” said Mrs. Kerr delightedly. “Was he really severe? Sydney,
+you must tell me; how fearfully funny!” She narrowed her eyes for a
+moment as though she were trying to picture the meeting of Sydney and
+Ronald. “I don’t believe,” she admitted, “that he was pleased at finding
+everyone dancing. It didn’t, somehow, seem right. But I daresay he
+thought _you_ severe; I must ask him—you terrify me. He seemed rather
+dazed by you all.”
+
+“I’m glad his first day is so fine,” said Sydney and felt as though by
+this she were somehow including herself in the happiness of the Kerrs.
+
+“Yes, I’m always lucky,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “Now we’re going out
+together. You can’t think what it is like to be going out with a son. It
+is unbelievably nice—I’d forgotten.”
+
+“Well, good-bye,” said Sydney, standing back against the wall for her
+friend to pass. “I don’t suppose we shall see each other again to-day.”
+
+“Oh, shan’t we? What a pity!” Mrs. Kerr said vaguely. “There’s that
+unfortunate Ronald,” she cried glancing out of the window, “marching up
+and down out there—do look—in a Panama hat. How horrid of me to dawdle!”
+She nodded to Sydney and went on smoothly downstairs leaving besides her
+faint perfume a sensible backwash of eagerness, expectancy and delight.
+
+Sydney stared out at the hill, crude in sunshine, then went on upstairs.
+She thought how ironic it was that a day made to order for two people’s
+triumphant occasion must be at the same time dealt out as a background
+to everyone else. She felt she had no energy and could never get as far
+as her room, choose her gloves, find her parasol and put on her hat. At
+the thought of anything beyond this, her prospect for the day, she
+faltered. With a sense of reprieve she let herself be waylaid by
+Cordelia Barry, who was hanging about the stairs.
+
+“I say, Miss Warren, it’s Thursday.”
+
+“Is it?”
+
+“I don’t go to the Convent on Thursdays, I was wondering ... I thought
+perhaps.... No, but of course you wouldn’t, would you? I don’t suppose
+it would suit you at all....” Cordelia, with an air of infinite
+calculation looked sideways at Sydney under her lashes. Sydney,
+remembering the promise Cordelia had exacted, had a pang of acute
+nostalgia for that afternoon of the carnations, sundered from her by the
+eternity of a different mood.
+
+“I’m sorry, Cordelia: I’m going for a walk with Mr. Milton.”
+
+“O-oh! That is a pity. I suppose I couldn’t come too? Oh no, but of
+course you wouldn’t want me, would you? But I don’t mind Mr. Milton if
+he doesn’t mind me, and I don’t see really why I shouldn’t come.”
+
+“Neither do I. I suppose—You can come along if you want to,” said
+Sydney, denying a sense that this was mischievous on her part and a
+shade dishonourable. At all events to annoy somebody in her turn surely
+was owed to her? “He pretends,” she thought, “he professes to be fond of
+children. And it’s not as though we had anything to say to one another.
+We talk and talk, and cancel out each other’s ideas until it all comes
+down to what it was before: that we do not agree. At the end of it all
+it is as though nothing had been said. I do not even understand myself
+any better at the end of it and if that fails what is the use of
+conversation? Nothing will ever crystallize out of our being together;
+not so much as a notion.”
+
+She deliberated, however, for some moments over her hats and scarves and
+returned more than once to the looking-glass to review herself
+critically.
+
+Milton was waiting below in the lounge and his face did fall perceptibly
+as Sydney, at last appearing at the turn of the stairs, indicated
+Cordelia, less in tow than towing, capering possessively about her.
+
+“Oh!” said he, and looking down at their two pairs of descending feet
+could think of nothing better to say.
+
+Sydney wondered if her face had looked like that to Mrs. Kerr some
+moments ago: the comparison was distasteful. “This is Cordelia Barry,”
+she said with bright hardiness, “the eldest of three. She would like to
+come with us; you don’t mind, do you?” To her surprise, Milton turned
+away without a word to take his walking-stick from the rack behind him.
+“You don’t mind, do you?” echoed Cordelia shrilly.
+
+“I’m very pleased, of course, if Miss Warren has invited you,” said
+Milton, holding open the door for them. But as Cordelia passed out
+behind Sydney with the self-assurance of a pet monkey he looked daggers
+at her profile.
+
+“I’ve just seen the Kerrs going off,” he said to Sydney as he came
+abreast with her. “Ronald looks brighter this morning: indeed decidedly
+pleased with himself.” His pale-grey eyes encountered Sydney’s
+thoughtfully.
+
+“Yes,” she said, “it’s nice to see them together.” She could tell by his
+tone that he was angry with her and was vaguely brandishing a weapon
+which he understood to be deadly but did not quite know how to use. He
+was nice-looking and at the moment unapproachable; she felt too
+spiritless to spar with him, and said, to propitiate, “It is a lovely
+day for a walk; I haven’t been for a walk for ages,” and looked at him
+gently. He noticed that her eyes had dark circles round them which were
+unbecoming and pitiful.
+
+Milton had woken up this morning with the determination to take Sydney
+for a walk. Nothing in that moment of lucidity had seemed simpler to
+arrange, and nothing could actually have been simpler, as things had
+turned out. He knew as well as she did, and would have been prepared to
+admit to her, that the time they had spent together up to now had been
+profitless and left them both sore. But he was convinced (the conviction
+emerged with what now seemed inevitability from the confusion and
+ill-spent emotion of last night) that a need corresponding to his own
+must exist in her somewhere. A need perhaps, less of each other
+exclusively than of something only attainable jointly, of something
+rooted in each. “But I do not know how to begin,” he had complained to
+himself till this morning. Now he felt a mastery of the situation to be
+possible. “If I could only make her understand,” he thought, “there
+would be time enough for her to care for me.” At any rate here they
+were, walking together. The presence of this confounded little girl he
+chose to discount.
+
+He turned, however, to talk to Cordelia kindly. They had chosen a road
+above the town for the sake of the view and meant to drop down through
+the fishermen’s quarters and come home by the sea. Cordelia begged that
+she might be allowed to visit the graveyard. Milton observed
+conventionally that her taste seemed a little morbid.
+
+“Oh no, Mr. Milton; you really ought to see the graveyard here; it’s
+most uncommon and beautifully decorated. I suppose as a clergyman you’ve
+had so much experience of them that you get out of the way of noticing
+but I am sure you’d be struck by the one here. It’s _most_
+blood-curdling.”
+
+“If you like that sort of thing,” said Milton in the somewhat top-heavy
+manner in which he could not help talking to children, “you should get
+your mother to take you to the Campo Santo at Pisa.” Cordelia evidently
+suspected from his tone that he did not think her tastes sufficiently
+elevated, while Sydney remarked parenthetically that she did not see
+Mrs. Barry taking her children to Pisa.
+
+“I might, of course,” suggested Cordelia, “be sent to a convent there to
+be taught to speak whatever they do speak. You see, my mother has got a
+perfect mania about languages. She would like me to be able to speak
+ninety-nine different ones even if I never learnt anything else. Though
+what, I should like to know, is the use of speaking ninety-nine
+languages if one has nothing to say? Now I think the nuns have no idea
+of teaching; I’ve never been so badly taught in my life. They flap about
+and go on and on at one and half the time one can’t understand what
+they’re saying and when one does it doesn’t make sense. I don’t wonder
+they got turned out of France—I’m not learning anything. However, the
+nuns think nothing matters so long as they go on being religious, and
+mother thinks nothing matters so long as they go on being French, so
+there you are.”
+
+Sydney agreed that this was all very difficult. Milton who wondered what
+would become of this little girl was silent and looked so much depressed
+that Cordelia to cheer him up caught hold of his hand and swinging
+herself along by it asked him whether he was fond of reading. “I am,”
+said she. “My two favourite authors are Rider Haggard and the Baroness
+von Hutten. Who are yours?”
+
+Milton hesitated and Sydney and Cordelia looked at him with curiosity.
+Conscious of Sydney’s attention, he was still debating how to answer
+most fruitfully when she said to Cordelia across him: “I don’t think Mr.
+Milton ever reads at all. I never see him with a book.”
+
+“That’s not fair,” said Milton. “I read too much as a rule. I came out
+_here_ for....”
+
+“For what?” said Sydney, looking about her expressively.
+
+“For people,” said Milton unwarily.
+
+“Oh!” they both exclaimed. “What an extraordinary thing to come for!—To
+come _here_ for,” Sydney added.
+
+“Don’t you know any people? Do you like them so much?” Cordelia
+enquired. “How funny! I only like people in books who only exist when
+they matter. I think it is being in danger or terribly in love or
+discovering treasure or revenging yourself that is thrilling, and for
+that you have to have people. But people in hotels, hardly _alive_...!”
+
+“Well, you don’t know what may not be happening to them,” Sydney
+emerging from her detachment felt it necessary to point out
+instructively. The road, a favourite promenade of the natives and
+visitors, rounded the face of a high embankment; they could have been
+looked down upon from the terraces of villas on one hand while on the
+other they were level with the tree-tops: the roofs of the town were
+below. Milton distractingly engaged in conversation by Cordelia, and
+Sydney released but not unfriendly looking ahead of her, they emerged on
+to a kind of gravelled plateau overlooking the sea. Here some benches
+had been placed, beneath umbrella-pines forming a kind of pergola, to
+promote contemplation of the bright panorama of coast. Beyond, the
+remoter hills were still snow-capped; others ran down to the sea in a
+succession of fine blue noses; headland behind headland fading towards
+France. The earth had this brilliant morning a kind of independent
+luminousness; there were still no shadows anywhere and the rocks, flat
+clustered roofs and campanili seemed to shed light as well as to receive
+it. For miles the bright-blue swelling glassiness of the sea received
+the coast gracefully among ripples that frayed continually into foam,
+slipped back into themselves, and slid on again. When Sydney, Mr. Milton
+and Cordelia had seated themselves on a bench, the fleshy spears of some
+cacti fringing the plateau darkly occupied the foreground of their
+vision. “Ah!” said Milton taking a deep breath of the air which here
+seemed to him stronger and fresher. Sydney was glad of his enjoyment of
+the day which to herself still seemed spilt out wastefully.
+
+“Doesn’t everything look as though it was cut out and painted,”
+exclaimed Cordelia, joyously swinging her legs. “Cordelia!” said Milton,
+looking at her with an air of inspiration, “do you like nuts?”
+
+“Very much. But I get plenty of them.”
+
+“Or figs?”
+
+“The seeds are bad for my teeth.”
+
+“Well, dates?”
+
+“I adore dates. I’m not encouraged to eat them much because they’re
+stickiest. But I do adore dates,” said Cordelia thoughtfully. “I wonder
+if I shall ever eat a date again?”
+
+“You may at any moment,” said Milton, and he told her that there was a
+little fruit-shop that he knew of, just below, where she could buy for
+the three lire he proposed to give her enough dates for them all. “I
+adore dates too,” he added. “The shop is on the left, by the
+tram-terminus, and they will talk any language you like.” He gave the
+child a slight push that was unnecessary: she was already sliding off
+the bench. After a side-glance at Sydney who had opened her mouth to
+protest she fled to some concrete steps and with a yelp of excitement
+vanished down them.
+
+“But she isn’t allowed to run about the town by herself,” said Sydney,
+vexed, “and she certainly isn’t allowed to eat between meals—she’s very
+much be-Nannied. Whatever made you do that?”
+
+“She’s not the sort of child to get talked to, and I’m sure she has an
+inside like an ostrich. If her people encourage her to attach herself to
+strangers like that they’ll have to take the consequences. I sent her
+off because she’s been the most infernal nuisance all the morning.”
+
+He was crimson. “You feel strongly about it,” said Sydney laughing at
+him, bathed in sunshine and forgetful of perils to Cordelia. “Moral
+indignation?” He did not interrupt her but something in his silence, his
+arresting consciousness of the gap Cordelia’s disappearance left between
+them and the clear view they had of each other, made her interrupt
+herself.
+
+“I’m sorry she has bored you,” she said nervously. “I really ought not
+to have brought her.”
+
+“No, I don’t think you ought. I asked you to come for a walk; I didn’t
+ask you to collect an expedition.”
+
+“Well, really—” she began, then stopped again. Their conspicuous if
+isolated situation, the matter-of-fact sunshine and the sense that with
+all said and done they were English Visitors, he and she, sitting
+appropriately on a bench before a view designed for their admiration,
+had up to now kept her purely impersonal. So objective did she feel that
+she imagined a delighted Commune gazing down at the two of them,
+“English Visitors.” In the expansion of the free air she had laughed and
+felt that neither of them were realler than the scenery. Now, at some
+tone in his voice she was surprised by a feeling that some new mood, not
+of her own, was coming down over them like a bell-glass. The bright
+reality of the view, the consciousness of their unimportant, safe little
+figures were shut away from her; were always there but could no longer
+help. She felt the bell-glass finally descend as he, after a glance
+round at the other benches and over the edge of the plateau, said
+quickly—“The thing is, Sydney, aren’t I ever to know you?”
+
+“I don’t see what you mean,” she said, suffocated by his manner. “Like
+everybody else, we see each other every day. Which was what, according
+to you, we are here for.”
+
+Milton, losing touch with her, lost touch with himself and was
+terrified. He had said, “Yes, but I was wondering if you would marry
+me,” before he had had time to think, on an instinct that he must get
+out _something_ at any price and have it there to stand by. She had
+understood what he said before he did, and had answered: “You are very
+good, but no: I’m afraid it’s impossible”; so that he had proposed and
+been rejected before he had entirely realized that they were not still
+quarrelling about Cordelia. When this did dawn on him he turned to her
+in dismay. “I’m afraid,” he said with a return to his usual manner,
+“that that was terribly awkward of me.”
+
+“Oh no, not at all,” said Sydney, smiling shakily. “It’s supposed to be
+very gratifying.”
+
+“I did not mean to have said that to-day, I need hardly explain. It was
+unforgivable of me. But I suppose while we are on the subject that there
+is no further harm in my asking you, whether you can—as I think they
+call it—give me any hope?”
+
+“No, I’m afraid not,” said Sydney feeling she had been asked something
+so preposterous that the answer was a matter for her common sense alone
+and that further enquiries need not be instituted.
+
+“Very well,” said Milton and the bell-glass lifted, though it hung above
+them. She felt as though this image must have presented itself to him
+also, for he drew, as though released from constriction, another deep
+breath of air. After staring straight ahead at the hills for a moment he
+said, “Thank you”: she did not know for what, she supposed for her
+courtesy. This implied (she felt) a dismissal, a “You may go now, I have
+done with you!”
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIII
+
+
+“But I thought he liked dates!” cried Cordelia. Panting at the top of
+the steps she stood clutching her package, appalled to see Milton walk
+away rapidly in the direction from which they had come. She had run both
+ways so as to waste as little time as possible away from her friends and
+she couldn’t help feeling that the escape of Milton in so short an
+interval could not but be due to some mismanagement on the part of Miss
+Warren; who now alone on the bench sat staring before her, smiling
+uneasily. There had seemed no risk in leaving him for a moment, he had
+had every appearance of being rooted there, or better perhaps, tethered.
+
+“But he _said_ he liked dates,” she repeated, bringing up reason to
+support her astonishment.
+
+The remark, which was not answered, seemed further to contribute to a
+gloom that had taken the place of the affable Mr. Milton and which
+momentarily, to both their perceptions, darkened the sunshine. Miss
+Warren now rose abruptly, shook out her pleated skirts and for the first
+time unfurling her parasol tilted it from her shoulder at an angle, with
+a concentration upon these details of her own elegance which implied
+dismally to Cordelia the exclusion of Mr. Milton even from memory. With
+a renewed, more genuine smile to Cordelia she suggested that they should
+continue their walk. Except for a few arcs and triangles in the gravel
+before the bench the friendly clergyman might never have existed.
+
+They followed the loops of the road in their gradual descent towards the
+cemetery. Sydney was talkative; they discussed novels, the difficulties
+of arithmetic and the superiority of cats over dogs. Once she turned and
+looked back at the benches as though horrified by the thought that they
+would still be there. Cordelia asked, “Have you forgotten something?”
+and she answered, “Oh no,” in confusion. It transpired that Mr. Milton
+had been recalled by an engagement of some importance, till then
+forgotten. Cordelia, who was able to estimate the probable importance of
+any engagement locally, said nothing. She suspected him to be a feeble
+walker, and moreover a man of quick appetites as quickly forgotten. She
+ate his dates and ceased to regret him; allowing the stones to
+accumulate in one cheek and spitting them out by half-dozens with great
+force. She proceeded down hill beside Sydney with a hop-skip-and-a-jump,
+kicking up the powdery white dust so that it swirled round her feet and,
+settling, iced the top of her shoes. She derived keen pleasure from
+this, also from a sense of the enviableness of walking with this
+appearance of intimacy with the distinguished Miss Warren. She hoped in
+vain that they might meet some of her friends.
+
+“I do think two’s better company,” she said at last, “but I hope this
+hasn’t been a disappointment to you.”
+
+“It’s a pity, of course,” said Sydney who could not help feeling it
+would have been more vigorous, more admirable on Milton’s part to have
+continued the walk with them. She believed herself able to recognize in
+what had occurred simply another of his nervous impulses, there had
+been, she was convinced, no impetus of emotion. In the unique encounter
+of eyes they had had, as with raised hat he was turning away from her,
+he had shown her nothing of what he felt but astonishment: a profound
+astonishment, at which of them she could not be sure. Those pale-grey
+eyes with their penetrating blankness were still vivid to her, but
+though she now intensely desired to reproach herself she could not wring
+from her memories any sense of his emotion. She came to doubt that she
+had witnessed anything more painful than the momentary topple of a shy
+but very potent vanity that had over-reached itself. A suspicion of
+having been casually snatched at hardened her towards him. He had not
+hurt her but he had set the pain of the earlier morning free to renew
+itself; a nerve was insistently throbbing. She became aware, with the
+knife-edge of a first realization, of each implication of the words,
+expression, gesture, with which Mrs. Kerr had detached herself and in
+smiling expectation gone past her downstairs.
+
+In such a mood she was not proof against the ordinary reflections on
+mortality as she looked with Cordelia through the cemetery gates. To see
+better, they pressed up their faces against the cold bars. Cordelia for
+the last ten minutes had been hurrying, her whole self narrowed down;
+she had become silent with apprehension. She was tortured by a fear that
+the cemetery with its ornaments might have rolled itself up and
+vanished, or worse, that it might fail in its pungent appeal, so that
+she would not this time experience what she had learned to describe as a
+“frisson” as she gazed through the gloom of the trees down that
+distracting prospective of monuments. Also, she had made herself
+responsible for the reaction of Miss Warren from the moment they turned
+down the suggestive cul-de-sac away from the sea, walled-in steeply and
+vanishing at a succession of angles round the palm-tufted bases of the
+hills.
+
+The cemetery seemed quite deserted. Gashes of overcharged daylight
+pressed in through the cypresses on to the graves; a hard light
+bestowing no grace and exacting each detail. In the shade of the
+pillared vaults round the walls what already seemed the dusk of evening
+had begun to thicken, but the rank and file of small crosses staggered
+arms-wide in the arraignment of sunshine. In spite of the brooding
+repose of the trees a hundred little shrill draughts came between them
+and spurting across the graves made the decorations beloved of Cordelia
+creak and glitter. A wreath of black tin pansies swung from the arm of a
+cross with a clatter of petals, trailing colourless ribbons; a beaded
+garland had slipped down slantwise across the foot of a grave. Candles
+for the peculiar glory of the lately dead had been stuck in the unhealed
+earth: here and there a flame in a glass shade writhed, opaque in the
+sunshine. Above all this uneasy rustle of remembrance, white angels
+poised forward to admonish. The superlatives crowding each epitaph
+hissed out their “_issimi_” and “_issime_” from under the millinery of
+death. Everywhere, in ribbons, marbles, porcelains, was euphuism, a
+suggestion of the salon, and nowhere could the significance of death
+have been brought forward more startlingly.
+
+“I must say,” remarked Cordelia, “I do like Italian graves; they look so
+much more lived in.”
+
+“They would certainly be more difficult than others to get clear of,”
+said Sydney, and quickly in unthinking perturbation she pushed open the
+cemetery gates, as though she were on a message to a friend’s house, and
+hurried in. Once among the graves she stood with Cordelia behind her,
+looking round again. She was oppressed by the thought, less of death
+than of the treachery of a future that must give one to this ultimately.
+She was not accustomed to consider death as other than a spontaneous
+fine gesture. Now it hinted itself as something to be imposed on one,
+the last and most humiliating of those deprivations she had begun to
+experience. She thought, “It is all very well to escape to the future
+and think it will always be there; but this is the end of the future.”
+Looking up to watch a bird fly slowly across the sky she realized that
+living as she had lived she had been investing the future with more and
+more of herself. The present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every
+moment spent itself in apprehension of the next and these apprehensions,
+these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her
+achievements and promised to make the past barren enough should she have
+to come back to it.
+
+James Milton’s attempt to come further into her life, to regions by his
+acquaintance of them surely sufficiently ice-bound, appeared in the
+light of present considerations heroic: he had been staking his future.
+But his future, she recollected, spun itself off into infinity. He did
+not acknowledge finality anywhere; this made him leisurely-seeming and
+easily generous. His impulses in any direction were not intensified by
+her own sense of urgency. In the light shed serenely down from that
+ultimate spaciousness he was covering life at an equable pace. He
+presented himself an undriven, a comforting figure. She saw him
+conducting a funeral; voluminous, fluttering, milkwhite, leaning like
+one of these angels over the yawn of a grave to scatter his handful of
+earth, his tribute to mortality; with the expression, a submerged beam,
+of this having in a cognizant Mind its order. The word “death” used in
+his presence would have a slow-dying ring to it, to which one would be
+able to feel him subconsciously listening. She contemplated with a faint
+inclination a life shared with someone for whom events would have this
+overtone of significance.
+
+And to be wanted! She remembered in what a mood she had climbed the
+stairs that morning, and looked round her at the now forever undesired
+dead. She tried to recall the feel of his handclasp and to imagine the
+touch of his lips. With a sigh: “I am very ordinary!” she tried over any
+terms of endearment which seemed within the range of his manner,
+listening gravely for a ring which, like the word death, she felt they
+would have for him.
+
+Cordelia sat on the end of a grave among a little city of glass domes,
+looking up intelligently. The child had read so many novels that she
+might well have been expected to know what there was to be known about
+the affairs of the heart. Feeling the bright eyes of Cordelia fixed for
+some moments upon her Sydney began to wonder whether her lips had been
+moving just now and if so, what Cordelia had thought; she feared that
+she might have gone so far as what in Cordelia’s novels would be called
+murmuring. Of this the child would approve too readily. For the moment,
+however, her attention did not seem to have wandered from the graves and
+she was determined not to allow Sydney’s to do so either.
+
+“Did you know,” she began, “that it costs a great deal of money to be
+buried permanently?”
+
+“It never occurred to me.”
+
+“A girl at the convent had a grandmother who died and she told me that
+the grandmother’s last request was to be buried permanently. If you
+aren’t—and it is fearfully expensive—they come and dig you up again.
+Italians never think of this; they are most improvident. They spend a
+lot of money trimming up the graves—I must say, they do do it very
+nicely—and then after all their trouble the cemetery people come and dig
+their relation up again, because the cemetery is too small and people
+keep on dying and dying, and they have to go in _somewhere_, if you see
+what I mean.”
+
+“Oh!” said Sydney and glanced behind as though she might expect to see
+the newly dead jostling one another in the gate. She felt that it had
+been a mistake to have come here at all, even to recover herself. This
+high-walled place with its one gate might well be a trap for her and she
+wondered what she should do if, instead of the dead, Mrs. Kerr and
+Ronald were to come in suddenly, talking and laughing (she could see
+them) as they stepped over the graves. Why they should come to the
+cemetery she could not imagine except that her dread of them, even in
+thought, might well prove a magnet to their unconsciousness.
+
+“Of course, of course,” she said loudly, “people must keep on dying.
+They should have made allowances for that.”
+
+“There is a rubbish heap at the back of the chapel.... If you’d come
+with me I could show you....”
+
+“What a horrid little ghoul you are,” Sydney said mechanically. She had
+found that in actually dealing with children theories collapse and one
+must retreat on the conventions. But when Cordelia in her reasonable
+little voice objected “Why?” she could think of nothing to answer. There
+seemed no reason, even conventionally, why she should impose on Cordelia
+the adult idea of “morbidity.” “People wouldn’t like you to talk about
+being dug up,” she said at last weakly, “though it seems to me a very
+practical arrangement. The Italians are realists.”
+
+“What is a realist?” asked Cordelia, while, having gathered up some
+china flowers lying about on the ground she stuck these by their wire
+stalks into the band of her hat. “Haven’t I made my hat smart? What
+_are_ realists?”
+
+“Ask Mr. Milton,” Sydney said promptly.
+
+“Is he—?”
+
+“No, of course not. But he will tell you what unenlightened people they
+are.”
+
+“He is a long-winded man,” said Cordelia, looking at her friend
+sideways.
+
+“Not at all,” said Sydney irritably. “And anyway, what do you know about
+it?”
+
+“Oh nothing, nothing at all. I don’t know what ‘long-winded’ means,
+even.”
+
+“Then you shouldn’t——”
+
+“It was a sporting risk, after all,” said Cordelia gravely and Sydney,
+rebuked, wished that she could be so honest. “Where,” she asked, “do
+they put the English?”
+
+“Over there; we have a very nice corner reserved. I’ll show you, shan’t
+I? There’s a little girl of just my age—mustn’t the people in her hotel
+have been upset about it? I often think—” she brooded.
+
+“Yes, I daresay you do. I often used to. But it wouldn’t be much fun,
+really, dying to impress other people, or to be picturesque or pitied.”
+
+“I suppose not, really. But I couldn’t help just imagining, that day
+they were so stuffy with us ’cause we broke the lift. I put my tongue
+out after Mrs. Hillier when she had stopped and been sarcastic at me in
+the passage, and I thought ‘Yah! if I liked you’d be sobbing and
+sniffing to-morrow and putting flowers—carnations—on my coffin and
+saying what a darling little girl I’d been!’”
+
+They went on to look at the English end of the cemetery, where more
+discreet memorials had been hewn into shapes better suited to granite
+than to Carrara marble. All round the cypresses waited. How complete the
+Riviera was, thought Sydney, one could even die here. Birds were rare;
+she started as one dipped from a tree and flew zigzag with a shrill cry,
+skimming the gravestones. Like an echo of the bird’s cry they heard the
+creak of a hinge as the gate, hidden by trees, was pushed open
+decorously. Sydney could feel her heart thump as they listened and
+waited.
+
+Presently Miss Pinkerton appeared between the cypresses, conscious even
+of the dead, her face composed into an expression of nobility. She
+looked to left and right of her through the graves and though she saw
+Cordelia and Sydney she did not seem at first to recognize them. They
+might have been figures in a crowd. Did they intrude?—She was carrying
+narcissi. She approached—the path allowed her no alternative—but she
+approached serenely; the encounter did not seem distasteful.
+“Good-morning,” she returned in a low voice when Sydney bowed. They
+turned to leave her.
+
+“Such a lovely spot,” remarked Miss Pinkerton, not unwilling to detain
+them.
+
+“Lovely,” Sydney agreed. “So peaceful!”
+
+“A friend of mine,” said Miss Pinkerton looking at them with her mild
+august eyes, “has a cousin here.” She indicated the destination of the
+narcissi. Sydney stooped to read the inscription.
+
+“He was an admiral,” said Miss Pinkerton and sighed again.
+
+“Isn’t he an admiral still?” exclaimed Cordelia, whom Sydney, pulling by
+the hand abruptly began to lead away.
+
+“You shouldn’t have asked that, Cordelia.”
+
+“But why shouldn’t I—Oh, Miss Warren, don’t hurry so! One would think
+you were running away from the admiral—why shouldn’t I have asked that?”
+
+“I suppose,” said Sydney after some reflection, “because Miss Pinkerton
+doesn’t know.”
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIV
+
+
+Suddenly the group round the doors had dispersed and everybody was
+leaning over the drawing-room balcony. Above all, all the way up the
+front of the Hotel, faces blossomed out unexpectedly, flinging away like
+veils the first oblivion of siesta. One would have thought a note of
+music had never been heard before or that the man into whose deep mouth
+they were all gazing down were himself Orpheus.
+
+He plucked from his mandoline shaking notes which the tensity and blaze
+of noon and the gathered silence of his audience did invest with a
+strangeness, and sang while the whole of him quivered. He did not cease
+to parade beneath the balcony while maintaining fountain-wise the spout
+of song. The child with red skirts clutching his coat-tails echoed, with
+the addition here and there of skips or quaver, his strut and his song.
+Her face with a smile’s general glitter across it was upturned to the
+balcony, eyes closed as though she could feel the benevolence of
+visitors descend upon the lids like rain.
+
+The airs were not classical. He sang “Funiculee-Funicula” and “Sole Mio”
+and presently (encouraging his little girl to dance for their English
+friends and quickening the measure till her brief skirts spun out into a
+disc) a song about the beauties of a doll.
+
+Ladies on either side of Ronald began pressing him closer, and more and
+more people came out through the window behind and leaned across his
+shoulders. He could hear, when he kept his head low, quite an orchestra
+of excited breathing.
+
+   “Ah ch’è bella la bambola mia,
+   Quasi, quasi più bella di me
+   Un vestito di ràso celeste
+   Un cappello di——”
+
+“Splendid!” somebody cried out and the wave of admiration mounting
+behind Ronald broke into clapping of hands and laughter. “This balcony,”
+he remarked to his mother under cover of this, “is like a print of a
+public execution.” He shone with an exhilaration induced by the music in
+spite of himself, but preserved his expression of disillusionment. “It
+will bust in a minute or two, and serve them all right for watching
+anything so beastly.”
+
+“But Ronald, _beastly_?” She turned to him in consternation, innocent as
+never before of irony.
+
+“The little devil’s blind,” said Ronald, pointing down and moving his
+shoulders angrily, for there were two what he called great fat women
+leaning on his back.
+
+The word spread somehow and when the child’s eyes again dropped open,
+then lazily shut, several people were alert to notice that the eyes were
+china-white. The minstrel, appreciative of the interest thus created,
+pulled his companion forward and stopped in his song to advertise her
+with a flourish. “_Cieca! cieca!_” he exclaimed and straddled shining up
+at them, all teeth. The little girl, in the ecstasy of this, flung her
+arms out and began to dance again, whirling at such velocity that it was
+as though she tore the music from the mandoline to follow her. Ripples
+of “Shame” and “Cruel” crept down the balcony but from the windows above
+the first drops of a shower of nickel were spinning already. The shower
+thickened and there was for a moment or two in the air a continuous
+glitter. The little girl paused, leaning against the wind of her
+movement, and seemed to listen in ecstasy. She snatched up handfuls of
+air and surrendered them laughingly, then flung herself with cries of
+delight to and fro on the gravel and, groping, gathered up her harvest.
+There followed some heavier coins, the escape of a sigh and a faint
+burst of horrified laughter.
+
+“But she _is_ happy,” maintained Sydney, standing back against the frame
+of the window and a voice she could not trace but believed to be
+Milton’s supported her with, “Yes, yes, she must be.”
+
+Ronald wriggled beneath the weight of the two good women but could not
+extricate himself in time to see who, on either occasion, had spoken. He
+would have given much to do so. All to-day there had been phrases,
+broken-off, exclamatory, rising stark like this out of a hush or a hum
+with a significance for him foreign to their context, with startling
+relevance to something in his mind.
+
+He pushed his way back into the drawing-room, now quite vacant and in
+yellow shade from the awning. He sat down on a sofa, leaned back,
+crossed his legs, and waited for his mother to appear in the window, as
+she almost immediately did, and after a moment’s blank stare through the
+dusk to perceive him and come over royally. She did concede—and
+generously he could approve the concession—a few words back over her
+shoulder, perhaps to Miss Warren out there. Then she sat beside him,
+most beautiful in the half-light, her attitude settling into complete
+repose as silk settles into its folds. She had still a little amusement,
+a faint perturbation, but she was allowing these ripples to widen and
+fade in her mind. It would be clear of them soon, a smooth consciousness
+on to which he hoped to stream like light.
+
+They were still after this life-long strangeness to one another at a
+stage when the novelty of being together made each seeking-out of one
+another unique. A meeting was in the nature of a rendezvous and the
+_mise-en-scène_ queerly important. The isolation of rendezvous made
+indifferent such publicity as that of a bench, a waiting-room, or this
+rigid sofa pasted square to the wall of a drawing-room. So they sat
+here, Ronald exalted.
+
+“And now?” his mother said, after some moments in which the music having
+come to an end, the shoal swept past from the balcony with a sympathetic
+aversion of glances. A lust for spectacle which the little blind girl
+had aroused was gratified by them passingly and Ronald knew that many
+people had considered them “touching.” The room empty once more, it was
+as though Mrs. Kerr had had to expostulate with herself for being too
+happy. “And now?” she resumed with an air of obligation.
+
+“Why ‘now’?” said Ronald. “Can’t we stay here? I mean, unless you want
+to sleep. What is this room, anyway?” He looked round at the armchairs
+all facing one way with awful intelligence.
+
+“I think quite a number of women sit here.”
+
+“Obviously. But I’m not afraid of an atmosphere.”
+
+“Dear Ronald, you seem to be thickening. I was always alarmed and
+impressed by the idea that you _were_ afraid of an atmosphere: that they
+were dangerous.”
+
+_He_ had been always alarmed and impressed by the idea that she had not
+an inkling of his subtleties; or rather, would not exert herself to
+perceive them. But since his arrival at this Hotel he had been amazed by
+the fineness of her perceptions, not only from moment to moment but by a
+sudden vista of them along the past, perceptions so delicate,
+appreciations so faultless that it could only have been some lack of an
+equal fineness that had made him suffer an infinite deprivation. Now
+when she said that he was thickening he was able to smile at her.
+
+“I suppose I must have amused my mother?”
+
+“Ronald, you were so subtle. I was inadequate.”
+
+“_I_ was inadequate. Shut up!” He shook her arm gently.
+
+“I can’t help laughing. Do you know, I, I respect you? Why should I have
+to confess this instead of announcing it? I do respect you,” she
+repeated, saying the word diffidently and looking back on what she had
+said with apparent misgiving.
+
+“As a matter of fact,” said Ronald gravely, “I don’t think _we_ mind
+being respected. I think, Mother, if you don’t mind my saying so, that
+it is a mistake ever to confuse us with your _fin-de-siècle_
+contemporaries. Of course a remark like that would have a thousand
+satirical reverberations in—say—a Wilde play. But really, one is able to
+take it quite simply.”
+
+“That’s where you all are so wonderful,” said Mrs. Kerr, with the deep
+thoughtfulness she brought to bear on his every remark. “Of course I do
+date hopelessly, as Sydney says.”
+
+“Sydney? Oh, the girl, yes. Was she asked?”
+
+“Ronald, you’re unkind. Don’t say ‘gurl’ like that. I thought you’d like
+her, she’s immensely clever.”
+
+Ronald was surprised to realize that the fact that he did not like
+Sydney, of which he was himself only now aware, must long have been
+obvious to his mother. “If she were not a ‘gurl,’ she wouldn’t be here.
+Anyway, isn’t she rather unnatural? The young Lawrences have at least a
+certain crude attractiveness.”
+
+“She’s been crude enough to care for me.”
+
+“I thought you couldn’t tolerate _schwärmerei_.”
+
+“Oh, but that suggests the _backfisch_. Could one be ungenerous enough
+not to take what is offered one finely? Don’t be tiresome to her; do
+justify yourself. She’s prepared to find you _rather_ tiresome.”
+
+“Was she asked?”
+
+“She thinks twenty is a tiresome age. She’s twenty-two, you see. Anyway,
+don’t let’s bother about her now. This ‘respect’ that I’ve just
+discovered and you’ve authorized is so very comfortable to me. It does
+please me so—you may have felt this but I haven’t put it into words
+because these large admissions are embarrassing—that you’ve come down to
+me from Germany, given up Germany. I hope it didn’t cost a lot?”
+
+Ronald looked embarrassed.
+
+“I meant in _development_. Pictures? Music?”
+
+“Oh, those, no. Anyway, Mother, as I should have explained” (an
+irritated consciousness of having already done so at great length
+brought a note into his voice) “those were a purely secondary——”
+
+“Of course they were. How dense I’ve been again. I _mean_ the
+Rentenmark.” She laid a hand on his knee, leaned back her head against
+the wall and, he believed, even blushed her contrition; yet this was all
+said with such a vivid disclosure, such a flash of her personality that
+he was overwhelmed. In spite of a convinced feminism which should have
+armoured him Ronald never failed to be overwhelmed by sheer femininity.
+Not since little boyhood did he remember such flashes from her; she had
+seemed for those middle years rather withdrawn and perverse, in her very
+elegance abstract.
+
+He stuttered his reasons for coming from Germany, sadly abashed. He told
+her how she had distracted him by a letter now and then or a memory from
+his regard of the economic confusion upon which he had so admirably
+concentrated himself. Her reprehensible undistress had been a perpetual
+temptation. Also he had not been able to see when else, in the press of
+the next two years, he could be with her for long. Also, he admitted
+scrupulously, it did happen to fit in very well with his project of
+meeting the Byngs in Sicily.
+
+He did not however admit to a childish feeling of homelessness or to
+having been lonely in Munich and bored in Dresden, while several people
+had been rude to him in Berlin. He did just glance for a moment
+tentatively at his mother, then he gulped the admission down; he drew in
+his feet and stared a little haggardly round the drawing-room. He may
+have guessed that they were not likely to come nearer to each other than
+these precipitate little plunges into intimacy, this succession of
+rendezvous, would carry them.
+
+Round him stripes prevailed on the tight brocades of the upholstery, on
+the mats methodically diamond-wise on the polish; stripes were repeated
+innumerably in the satiny wall-paper and the lace blinds over the door.
+One had a sense of being caged into this crowded emptiness. This seemed
+the strangest place to sit and make demands on motherhood, the strangest
+place for motherhood in answering to make itself palpable. He felt half
+impelled to ask his mother some fantastic question: “What do I mean to
+you?” or “What part do I play in your life?” or even (a final outrage)
+“Do you care for me?” (This he could not remember that she had ever
+avowed.) Even were the putting of such questions conceivable a direct
+reply from her here was not; there must ensue some cataclysm, the
+stretched brocades would rip audibly, the pot-bellied vases crack. His
+most daring conception of an intimacy was a freedom to ask or to answer
+such questions; though he also conceived that in intimacy the reserves
+would have trebly their value.
+
+“It will be dull for you here,” said his mother, interpreting his vague
+scrutiny. “I do nothing at all all day long, so I haven’t had time for a
+feeling of rootlessness; but if I’d known you were coming out I’d have
+taken a villino. Sydney found me the nicest little villino stuck to the
+side of a rock and wanted to take it for both of us, but it would have
+meant the dear muzzy cousin with the inside coming too, and that Sydney
+wouldn’t consider, though she couldn’t for a moment, either, consider
+leaving the cousin. So the idea dropped. A pity, I think now,” Mrs. Kerr
+said reflectively.
+
+“A disappointment for Sydney.”
+
+“I’m afraid they seem inevitable. She is a very disappointable girl. But
+it really is a pity from our point of view, because she’d be moving out
+now and you would be moving in. How long is it, I wonder, since you and
+I have kept house? Perhaps I have deprived you of something—I cannot
+feel that I have?”
+
+“The idea that you should what is called ‘live for me’ is quite
+barbarous,” said Ronald reassuringly.
+
+“Yet I cannot disentangle myself from the idea that it isn’t right for a
+woman not to be a little barbarous.”
+
+“Being rational,” Ronald considered, “should take them as far. You see,
+they can ... they can _canal_ the natural forces——”
+
+“Oh! But I don’t feel as if I had got any natural forces,” said Mrs.
+Kerr, alarmed. “And you know, Ronald, you would hate me to be rational.
+It’s forbidding and horrible in a woman, I think.”
+
+“But one does want them to understand themselves.”
+
+“Oh, you know you would not be attracted by a woman who did.”
+
+“Do attractions really matter so much?” asked Ronald in the strained
+voice of one in whom a whole torrent of conviction banks itself up
+behind the narrow escape of speech, impeding its own exit.
+
+“My darling.... Shall we have to be so very hygienic and bald?”
+
+He could put nothing he felt into words.
+
+His mother took up one of his hands, turned it over thoughtfully, then
+laying it down on her knee pulled each finger gently, spreading each out
+and feeling the tip with her own. “Nice hands,” she said with a sigh. “I
+do wish you hadn’t had to go to Germany.”
+
+That “hygienic” had stung Ronald. It was like getting a splash in the
+eye from one’s own disinfectant. “I suppose,” he said, as though he were
+speaking to her in the dark and had to guess her position, “that you
+think I don’t like things to be beautiful.”
+
+“Don’t be chilly with me—I didn’t mean that. I’m frivolous you see and I
+can’t express myself. I only do mean that I think you and Sydney are a
+little inclined to over-estimate the value of what you call ‘truth’
+(though I do agree it is very important) and that this does tend to
+produce in your conversation rather an atmosphere of white tiles.”
+
+“It must be depressing for you to have a son like an operating theatre,”
+said Ronald with bitter mirth, and amended, more fatally apt, “or a
+bathroom.”
+
+Mrs. Kerr leaned her head against the wall again and shut her eyes; her
+lids remained closed as though she already were sleeping and a faint and
+very mysterious smile suggested to him for some seconds a profound
+slumber. With an idea that it might be forbidden to sleep in the
+drawing-room (could one have imagined it possible to do so) he got
+protestingly up and stood over her.
+
+“_May_ I go to sleep?” she said without moving. “Even for you, darling,
+I can’t do without my siesta.”
+
+“Tell me before you go quite away,” he exclaimed, “if I’ve been boorish
+and horrible?”
+
+“You’ve been lovely,” breathed out Mrs. Kerr on a sigh, and behind the
+mask of her face she perceptibly retreated from consciousness, in the
+attitude of the Beata Beatrix. Looking down at her he went back through
+his memory, past his admiration for Rossetti to the day when at six
+years old he had called his mother “My Beautiful.” As she did not stir
+and, the Hotel being absolutely silent, there seemed no danger of
+anybody coming in to disturb her, he sat down again silently on a small
+chair. From here he could see to the left of her sofa, the long strip of
+awning orange against the sun and, beneath it, the blue line of sea,
+with clotted geraniums swinging down from their boxes. Across his panel
+of sea a fishing-boat made a slow progress; this had vanished behind the
+window-frame and another followed it before Mrs. Kerr opened her eyes
+again or Ronald stirred from the profound meditation into which, with
+folded legs and limply hanging arms, he had relapsed.
+
+
+
+
+                                   XV
+
+
+Veronica was in despair. She slipped, after a doubtful tap, round
+Sydney’s door, and professing an acute desire for sympathy and
+consolation, sank without further explanation into the billows of plump
+eiderdown on Sydney’s bed, kicked her white suède shoes across the room
+and flung her hat after them.
+
+“The floor hasn’t been swept,” said Sydney, looking up from her book.
+Notwithstanding the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels
+before luncheon she had been enjoying “Jude the Obscure.” She did not
+mind Veronica coming in but wished she did not have to talk to her.
+
+“I don’t care if I don’t put any of them on again,” announced Veronica
+in the toneless accents of sincerity. “They are abominable.”
+
+“_I_ think the clothes you wear are nice,” said Sydney. “Have you got a
+pain?”
+
+“As a matter of fact, I hate all my clothes. And I don’t know what is to
+become of me. Does it ever occur to you that being alive is a mistake?”
+She swung a stockinged foot and sighed. “I do wish,” she said, “that I
+had brought my knitting. I do think conversation when one hasn’t got
+anything to do with one’s hands feels fearfully awkward, don’t you? And
+I really should like to talk, if you don’t mind. You’re not doing
+anything—I mean, only reading?”
+
+“Why don’t you go out?”
+
+Veronica explained that she was sick of other people’s faces and was
+certain, comfortably, that Sydney would understand what she meant.
+Sitting here in Sydney’s room, to which she had not yet been invited,
+among Sydney’s possessions gave her a feeling of being listened to which
+she would never have had on neutral ground. Ordinarily, this would not
+have affected her one way or the other; she herself never listened very
+attentively to what other people were saying. The gist of a remark was
+enough for her. This was a north room, the morning’s glare was reflected
+back to it faintly from the face of the hill. Veronica preferred her own
+room, and thought that it was just like Sydney to be at the back of the
+first floor instead of the front of the fourth with a balcony and
+sunshine. She, Joan and Eileen shared a room with sloping ceilings that
+resembled a rabbit-hutch. This, she thought, looking round her, was
+rarefied but rather depressing.
+
+“Does it seem to you,” she said weightily, “that this world is entirely
+divided into rather stupid men and very silly women? And that the stupid
+are all one will ever have to hope for and that the silly are all one
+can ever become?”
+
+Sydney, thoughtful over this, was certain that there must be other
+variations.
+
+“There aren’t,” said Veronica definitely. “I think you are usually
+fairly lucid and at present I am; I have absolutely no illusions about
+anyone. Look at the things people say to you and the things they expect
+you to do and the ridiculous way people don’t know what they want and
+the fuss they make when they can’t get it. Look at the sort of way
+people go on if you ask them for any opinion about anything you’ve
+done.”
+
+“I never ask anybody else their opinion,” said Sydney (she felt
+odiously).
+
+“One must have something to go by.”
+
+“Go by yourself.”
+
+“As a matter of fact,” said Veronica, rolling sideways on to her elbow
+to pluck a long white feather out of the eiderdown, “I suppose I’m
+rather humble, really. By the way,” she added after a pause in which two
+more feathers had been extracted, “what is your absolutely candid
+opinion of the man Victor?”
+
+“_How_ absolutely candid?—I mean, would anything hurt?”
+
+“Nothing, thanks. Do I look it?”
+
+“Well, candidly, I do think he’s rather a dreary young man.”
+
+“I thought you did,” said Veronica briskly. “Everybody seems to. Of
+course, I know him fairly well.”
+
+“And isn’t he?”
+
+“Oh, not more than others.” Veronica slipped off the bed and began to
+walk round the room thoughtfully. Hands on hips she paused a moment to
+look at herself in the wardrobe glass from every angle. “One might be
+led to expect,” she said with obvious relevance, “something better than
+all that, you know.” It did seem that for all she had been designed for
+she was tragically more than adequate. She remained staring at Sydney
+with a fated air while Sydney said: “He seems attached to you.”
+
+“Of course,” said Veronica, matter-of-factly but without complacency.
+
+“Do you want to get rid of him?”
+
+“Yes—no. What would be the good? Everybody’s the same and I must have
+somebody.”
+
+“Oh, well,” said Sydney, withdrawing. A moment’s rather fine light had
+played on Veronica, but now Sydney felt, in revulsion, a mild contempt.
+Women, she thought, are all tentacles: this last remark had suggested a
+wide but horribly purposeful groping about.
+
+“And if you come to think of it,” said Veronica, “people who are fond of
+one may be damned dull and absolutely monotonous but they are rather
+touching. I hate pitying people, but I can’t help it. Fancy feeling like
+that! I do think men are pathetic, don’t you? If only they were more
+interesting.”
+
+“I should have said they were interesting.”
+
+“You wouldn’t if you’d had as many as I have,” said Veronica gloomily.
+“I do envy you being so fearfully clever, Sydney, it’s kept you young
+for your age. I daresay I thought men were interesting when I was about
+seventeen. Now I can see they’re all exactly the same.”
+
+“If that’s the effect you produce on them,” said Sydney, “I should let
+them be. And it would be fairer. After all, as one was told when one
+wouldn’t finish up one’s dinner, there are many poor girls——”
+
+“Oh, I daresay. But what am _I_ to do? I don’t want to _be_ anything.
+I’m not modern. I’d be perfectly happy the way I am if only other people
+weren’t exactly like they are. Sydney, you give me the creeps sitting
+there like an idol. Do say something. Tell me what you think will become
+of me.”
+
+“Why do you ask me? I’m the last person in the world to be able to
+understand you. It would be better, even, to ask Victor.”
+
+“I never talk to him. But you’re so _lucid_.”
+
+“Who said that?” asked Sydney at once, pouncing on an adjective which
+did not seem to have its place in Veronica’s vocabulary.
+
+“Mr. Milton,” said Veronica unabashed. “We think ‘lucid’ is a good word;
+we’ve taken it up. You should hear Eileen! _He’s_ got a tremendous
+vocabulary, he said you were ‘clear-cut.’”
+
+“Oh! How amusing. Does he talk about me?”
+
+“Of course he does; he’s fearfully keen on you.”
+
+“Oh! How amusing....”
+
+Veronica laughed tolerantly. “‘In love,’ if you prefer it,” she
+continued. “I suppose as he’s middle-aged that that is rather more
+expressive.”
+
+Sydney, feeling as though she had caught Milton unawares, felt rather
+ashamed of herself. The picture that came as those awkward sounding
+words left Veronica’s lips was as sudden as though that scene on the
+plateau (which had disconnected itself from the rest of her memories)
+had not occurred. She had so entirely divested that all-staged proposal
+of all the traditional trappings that she had come to account for it
+merely as one of the more blatant of his occasional solecisms. They had
+frequently met since then without awkwardness, without the ghost of an
+echo.
+
+Sydney could never hear any mention of love without an envious pang for
+its object and now, as though feeling came quicker than thought, she had
+felt this pang sharply before she had had time to say to herself “He is
+in love with _me_.”
+
+“I daresay he may propose, you know,” said Veronica maternally, with an
+air of having their situation well in hand. “That will be awful for you;
+he’s a darling old thing—not so very old, either,” she amended
+politely—so politely that Sydney realized she herself must have
+transgressed an etiquette in depreciating Victor. “He is one of the few
+men,” said Veronica with a sigh, “who can talk intellectually to me and
+make me talk intellectually without feeling a fool.”
+
+Sydney longed to overhear them. “He and I,” she said, “can’t talk to one
+another. He keeps tripping up and tripping me up like a bad dancer.”
+
+“Oh, _well_,” said Veronica, “under the circumstances what can you
+expect?” and Sydney shrugged her impatience at this conception. Veronica
+sitting down before the dressing-table leant on her elbows, curling her
+feet round the rungs of the chair. She amused herself for some moments
+by squinting horribly at her own reflection, then she took up Sydney’s
+puff and began thoughtfully to powder her face. “Talking of types,” said
+she, “none of us seem to be making much impression on young Ronald, do
+we? Did you ever see such a mummy’s-boy! Oh, I beg your pardon, Sydney,
+I was forgetting Mrs. Kerr was a friend of yours.”
+
+“It doesn’t matter.”
+
+“I must say, I do think she’s odd about Ronald. She doesn’t seem to have
+taken any notice of him for years and now they go about all over the
+place like Romeo and Juliet. Of course I daresay he makes a fearful fuss
+over her. These selfish mothers get the best of it all the way. I shall
+be a selfish mother.”
+
+“As a matter of fact, you won’t,” Sydney said with a flash of insight.
+
+“Well, I should never have the nerve to be as blatantly selfish as she
+is. I think she’s treated you very badly, too: that makes me furious—I
+say, Sydney, your powder doesn’t suit my face! Look, it makes me pale
+blue. You have got a skin, you lucky devil! _I_ always use basanée.”
+
+“Why do you think she has treated me badly?” asked Sydney
+dispassionately. She waited for Veronica to continue and her
+expectations of what was coming raced ahead.
+
+“Well, she has so absolutely given you the go-by, hasn’t she?” said
+Veronica, replacing the alabaster lid of the powder-bowl then looking
+down to blow some powder off her dress. “It was ‘Sydney this’ and
+‘Sydney darling that’ and ‘Where’s Sydney?’ and ‘Sydney and I are going
+together,’ and now he’s come she simply doesn’t see you.”
+
+Sydney, after an interval, leant sideways to push the window further
+open. She seemed to have forgotten Veronica, who energetically
+continued, “Of course I’m sorry for you. Everybody’s sorry for you.”
+
+“Oh,” said Sydney.
+
+“Do you _mind_ the way she’s going on?” asked Veronica curiously.
+
+“It hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything to mind,” said Sydney
+with a high-pitched little laugh and a sensation of pushing off
+something that was coming down on her like the ceiling in one of her
+dreams. It seemed incredible that the words Veronica had just made use
+of should ever have been spoken.
+
+“Well, it has occurred to everybody else, you know,” said Veronica and
+picking up a string of amber she held it against her dress and leant
+back to admire the reflection. “Take a word of advice from one who
+knows, my dear,” said Veronica sagely, “and never trust any woman an
+inch. They’re all alike, cats every one of them.”
+
+—“I thought there was something special you wanted to talk about,”
+Sydney broke in eagerly, making a dart for this way of escape from
+herself. For very nervousness she could not stop talking, and Veronica’s
+affairs now offered themselves gratefully as a kind of jungle in which
+her own values could be obscured and forgotten. “You were in despair,
+Veronica,” she insisted more eagerly, “you said just now you were in
+despair.”
+
+“I know,” said Veronica willingly. “I did feel like nothing on earth.
+But you’ve cheered me up immensely. It’s queer how the most ridiculous
+little worry of somebody else’s will often take one’s mind off one’s
+own. But there really was something I wanted to ask you about. I’m
+engaged to Victor—would you advise me to be?”
+
+Sydney could not help feeling that any matron in the Hotel could have
+done as much for Veronica while she pronounced wisely: “Not if you’re
+not happy, of course.”
+
+“Well, I feel in a kind of way happy,” said Veronica, wriggling her
+shoulders. “You see, I do like Victor, and we do seem to be rather
+involved—which comes, of course, from having nothing else to do here.
+Oh, don’t look so grim, Sydney, you look fearfully grim. I mean, you
+might say the usual sort of thing, even if you don’t mean them; you give
+me the creeps.”
+
+“My dear,” said Sydney more warmly, “you must marry him if you care to.
+And I hope you’ll be fearfully happy.”
+
+“You know I really don’t see why one shouldn’t be,” said Veronica
+brightening, as though the possibility had only now presented itself.
+“Of course he’s got no money and no work and nothing _you’d_ call
+ability; but that makes me feel less of a mean pig.”
+
+“‘Pig,’ Veronica?”
+
+“For not feeling more thrilled. And he and I’ve got rather the same
+sense of humour. Of course there are people at home I could marry, but
+there’s not really much to choose between any of them. You see, I’ve got
+absolutely no illusions. I do feel I might have been terribly fond of
+somebody; I don’t think I’m really hard or anything, do you? Do you
+think perhaps men aren’t what they used to be?... It’s all very well to
+say ‘Don’t marry!’” cried Veronica, throwing both her hands up to forbid
+interruption and raising her voice, “but I must marry somebody. You see,
+I must have some children.”
+
+“Well, you needn’t necessarily marry——”
+
+“My _dear_ Sydney!” exclaimed Veronica, horrified and scarlet. Her
+changes of mood, definite as the slipping-along of lantern slides,
+expressed themselves in changes of attitude, so that unconsciously she
+was dramatic. Dejection once again drew out each line as she recalled:
+“But I’ve _kicked_ Victor: what is the use of a man one can kick?”
+
+The problem seemed likely to be one which she would be called upon to
+consider in its length and breadth repeatedly; she at once accepted the
+likelihood and turned away from it with a nod of admirable philosophy.
+“God knows!” sighed she, not irreverently. The problem would be
+dismissed at its every reappearance with this undefeated gracefulness.
+Sydney had a return of her earlier admiration. Veronica had taken up a
+sound position midway between defiance and resignation and seemed likely
+to achieve serenity.
+
+“And what shall _you_ do?” asked Veronica, as though they had been
+talking over their plans for the day. “I mean, when you get back to
+England?”
+
+Sydney was blank for a moment—back to _where_? “Oh, go on where I left
+off,” said she, “try and pass my next exam!”
+
+“Oh. Why?”
+
+“Well, I really——”
+
+“—I don’t suppose I should understand, should I? Funny how well we know
+each other—I’ve never given myself away like this before—and yet how
+little we _know_.... In an ordinary way, in London, we should run miles
+I daresay, rather than meet. Of course, I should have met Victor
+anywhere. I say, I hope I haven’t made your bed uncomfy, rolling about?
+I really can’t sit on foreign armchairs; they’re so steep.” She picked
+her hat up from the floor, brushed the dust off it tenderly and put it
+on. “As you say, this is not such a bad hat.” She heaved a deep sigh. “I
+feel ever so much happier; you are wonderful. Have you got a shoe-horn?
+These shoes are so tight, really that’s why I dislike them. I say, will
+you come to tea with me and Victor at the Patisserie and look at him
+again? He’s sensitive really; if you were nice to him he’d buck up
+tremendously, you’d be surprised. We eat a tremendous amount of
+patisserie, we adore it and it doesn’t seem worth while beginning to
+economize until there is some remote prospect of our getting married.
+And if we don’t get married—I mean, to each other—there will always be
+this to look back on. That’s what we feel.”
+
+Sighing and talking, vaguely she drifted towards the door. There she
+turned back and brilliantly nodded.
+
+A suspicion that this mood of lucidity had after all been induced by an
+over-indulgence in pastry cast a slight shadow on Sydney’s farewell. “I
+should be careful,” said she, “or you’ll both get most fearfully spotty.
+Look at those little Italians! Can’t you try some other narcotic?”
+
+“You should be thankful we don’t drink,” said Veronica and shut the door
+after her; not satisfactorily for it clicked open again and began to
+creak on its hinges in the manner of hotel doors all over the world.
+
+Sydney heard her quickening footsteps retreat; she listened forlornly,
+straining her ears for the last of them. Then she got up and tidied the
+bed; smoothed out the eiderdown, picked up the amber beads and hanging
+them round her neck stood telling them off like a rosary. Some
+premonition, such as that with which a recurring physical pain announces
+itself, made her snatch up “Jude the Obscure” quickly and stare at the
+pages, but there she found nothing but print. She looked up for a moment
+and—“She has so absolutely given you the go-by,” the room repeated,
+catching her unawares. The shapes of the furniture, everything that she
+looked at, said it again.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XVI
+
+
+The Villa Tre Cipressi concealed itself to the last, blotted out among
+the trees of its hillside; a long lane with broken-down walls led
+circuitously to its gates through olive-gardens. Since the last date of
+the Villa’s habitation the surface of the lane must have deteriorated;
+it was impossible now to imagine the burnished, sleek rushing-down it of
+cars or the thin-shod, delicate stepping of the Russian ladies. Miss
+Fitzgerald’s party, going forward in the leisurely and spread-out manner
+called in Ireland “streeling,” had begun to feel a profound disbelief in
+the existence of the Villa. Miss Fitzgerald had, however, in doing them
+the honours of what had been a private experience, constituted herself
+their hostess, and they hesitated to suggest this disbelief to her
+otherwise than obliquely, by a disposition to linger, sweep the hill
+with a glance then gaze back through the olive-trees, or to seat
+themselves at intervals, with some obvious thought of encampment, along
+the smoother parts of the walls. In the selection of them for a social
+bouquet there had been nothing striking except in a last addition. Mr.
+Milton went on nearly everybody’s picnics (it seemed a destiny beyond
+his influence), Miss Pym, as half of a duality, had been inevitable,
+Mrs. Hillier had been led to tolerate these two good women who did not
+know India and this parson who did not play bridge by her passion for
+villa gardens. It was Ronald who had been the master-stroke; he redeemed
+the bunch of them and made their grouping-together seem superbly
+conscious and studied, suggesting depths of art behind its effect of
+naïveté. So at least Mr. Milton felt that Ronald must be thinking, and
+he did not doubt that Ronald was right.
+
+After a series of sharp turns the Villa gate stared down on them, aware,
+one might have supposed by their triumphant whorls and scrolls of
+painted ironwork, of all they gained by presenting themselves so
+suddenly. A mild ascent led up to them and the three cypresses, which
+had an air of drawing together in council, dominated the approach. They
+came up rather breathlessly and stood behind Miss Fitzgerald in silence,
+as though they were prepared to rush the opening, while she sent the
+great key she had produced beforehand screeching round in the lock. Then
+they pressed in behind her, looking to left and right of them up at the
+palm-trees or between the boles which had an exotic, rather horrible
+fatness. The tangled gloom and the expanse of silence swallowed up their
+cries of admiration. Miss Fitzgerald, after checking off with nods of
+satisfaction all she still found here, invited Ronald to tell her
+whether this was not all he had hoped.
+
+Ronald had hoped nothing; he had not wished to accompany her. They
+misunderstood one another (though she did not suspect this); she had
+marked him down from the first as being of that delightful age which
+expects to be taken seriously and which to one’s ardent gravity will
+make shy, delicious disclosures. Ronald preferred in any encounter with
+women of a no longer redeemable age that might be forced on him to
+retreat behind an impassible whimsicality which amounted to archness.
+Thus there had been a conflict in their methods of approach, the equal
+determination of each of them to “take” the other rather than “be
+taken.” She had plumped down beside him that morning with her invitation
+at an instant of such crisis in his thoughts that he could have murdered
+her for the interruption. In Germany he had found he could not think,
+there had been too much time, some element of condensation had been
+lacking; here there had been nothing but a series of agonizing ruptures;
+the very fact of sitting down alone on bench or sofa seemed to be
+provocative and Ronald could not think properly standing up. “Your
+mother,” she had begun, “wanted me to ask you if you’d come with us to
+the Russian Villa—I have been lent the key. She is sure you will be
+delighted with it.” There had been nothing left for Ronald to say.
+
+A number of disappearing pathways darted off from the avenue; Corinthian
+pillars suggested themselves through a net of undergrowth and the arch
+of a stone bridge let one suppose water. The party hung fire,
+embarrassed by this choice of attraction, then continued to move slowly
+up the avenue in a close formation. This was more than a Villa, it was a
+country house, with, for the moment, nothing but the distinct shadows
+and an irregular splash of water to give away its foreignness. Then Miss
+Fitzgerald caught Ronald by the arm and pulled him sideways, pointing
+excitedly as though they were to surprise some living thing. “Look,” she
+cried, “up there—the Villa!” They all had a glimpse of it and were
+repelled; forty supercilious white windows, blankly shuttered, a
+vacillating shabbiness across its grey face that was neither old nor
+new. It had a solidity that was not local, an assured air of having been
+finally answered for; but it was as disappointing as one’s first
+princess.
+
+“Of course it isn’t like a _cinquecento_ villa,” said Miss Pym, anxious
+to make all allowances.
+
+“It is amusingly suggestive, isn’t it,” Ronald said to Milton, “of the
+‘Nuit de Portofino Kulm’?” and he was made to feel himself utterly
+isolated by Milton’s kind blank stare. “I’m afraid I haven’t read—” said
+Milton (Ronald felt, with complacency) “_Oh_ ...” said Ronald. He would
+have liked to discuss also, in the light of his own recent observations
+in Germany that mild baron of Charlottenburg who kept snakes in his
+parlour behind violet silk curtains. He sighed as though a door had been
+slammed in front of him. Perished civilizations interested Ronald, who
+had come too late to share a mild distress at their demise. Soon he was
+thinking fruitfully about Russia and was glad when Milton again gave him
+another opening by saying to Mrs. Hillier: “I often wonder whether the
+Russians weren’t after all the only people with any real notion of
+aristocracy.”
+
+“Does that mean you did or didn’t like Russians?” said Mrs. Hillier,
+looking at him cautiously, while Ronald, almost simultaneously
+exclaimed, “So real it was that this world was no place for them!”
+
+“Do you at all mean to suggest,” asked Milton, giving full attention to
+this last remark, “that they have simply been translated? Because I
+think that’s very tenable. It strikes me more and more as I live that
+this world’s no place for anyone with any real notion of anything and
+that its expulsion of them must be almost automatic.”
+
+“Their type was very refined,” said Mrs. Hillier. “Lovely creatures—but
+one can never altogether like them.” She looked about at the garden
+which, with its profound and hidden hollows around them, seemed to be
+waiting. “I must say,” she confessed, “this is delightful. Shall we go
+over that bridge? The garden must go on indefinitely—Look, there’s a
+seat with steps up to it right on the hill!” She made for the bridge,
+appearing, so abrupt was the turn of the path, to have plunged
+waist-deep into the shiny dark leaves that flopped back heavy as fishes
+from the sweep of her skirts. These plants with their overpowering
+glossiness must have sprung from wet soil. Milton and Miss Pym went
+after her; Ronald and Miss Fitzgerald seemed to have been delayed by a
+short argument; perhaps as to the nature of aristocracy. The garden gave
+Milton a distinct feeling of nervousness as though he were being
+scornfully watched. To allow this was to underrate oneself, so he asked
+abruptly, “If one comes to think of it, what was the good of them?”
+There was a pause filled in by the agitation of leaves, then Miss Pym
+upon whom an ever deeper despondency must have been working, replied,
+“If you come to think of it, what is the good of us?”
+
+“Well, really ...” said Mrs. Hillier.
+
+“Us _three_?” asked Milton, in an attempt to evade the issue. He could
+tell from the set of Mrs. Hillier’s back that in another minute or two
+they might be at grips with the problem of Empire.
+
+“No,” said Miss Pym still more wildly, “I mean us all, our class....”
+
+Mrs. Hillier stared at her, then decided to laugh. “I didn’t know you
+were a Socialist!”
+
+“But must one be a Socialist,” went on Miss Pym defiantly, “to wonder
+sometimes what is the good of us? Because one can’t help it (without
+wishing to attach oneself to any party) these days when so much is in
+the melting-pot.”
+
+“It’s hardly easy to talk about, is it?” said Mrs. Hillier lightly with
+the well-bred instinct to cover this that she had also when anybody
+tried to discuss religious experiences (though at present, with the
+excuse of a specialist, that would have been more permissible). “I
+suppose,” she elected to say, “it’s a matter of example, really, isn’t
+it? I mean: giving the others something to go by. I mean, people do
+notice. Why, one feels it even out here—Italians _notice_.”
+
+“But don’t you wonder if they don’t just think we’re lazy?” Miss Pym
+exploded. “I do: when my friend and I have been walking or reading and
+one feels them up on those terraces looking down on one and working
+away. Why, even in the Hotel, you know, one does wonder if the
+waiters——”
+
+“You’re just getting acutely self-conscious, Miss Pym, that’s what’s the
+matter with you!” laughed Mrs. Hillier, bluntly and kindly. “The
+creatures are positively parasites. If you’d lived out of England as
+long as I have, and seen how——”
+
+“—I’ve lived all over the Continent——”
+
+“—Oh, but that is different. I mean, _that_ just tends to make one
+cosmopolitan.”
+
+“Yes, but that’s just it,” cried Miss Pym, and then subsided, thoroughly
+confused.
+
+This engagement left Milton’s attention free to escape from them, which,
+while he walked decorously enough alongside and keeping back here and
+there a branch with his walking-stick, it is to be feared that it did.
+The path, by going up steeply for short distances and only gradually
+coming down again, presented a clever effect of being Alpine; one felt
+one must have climbed to a great height. One was humoured in this by
+being railed away solicitously from small precipices, and by being made
+to walk dizzily over the arches of bridges from which ravines with water
+seemed to drop away. Every now and then an artful perspective would be
+offered, to be veiled once more by trees. Once, in a Corinthian arbour
+that seemed balanced on the top of a tree like a ball upon a jet of
+water, he had a glimpse of Miss Fitzgerald talking to Ronald.... “And I
+expect,” she said, after a prolonged and breathless inspection of the
+profile he vouchsafed her, “that you write poetry too, don’t you?”
+Before his path dipped again he heard Ronald reply in a very nearly
+extinguished voice, “Well, as I said before, you see, my subject is
+economics.” Milton, whose sympathies were all with Miss Fitzgerald,
+ground his teeth. He considered Ronald definitely disobliging in his
+refusal to give hostages anywhere. He had been prepared for clever
+indolence or for a cool kind of wantonness in Mrs. Kerr’s son, or for
+polite nullity, or resentful dullness in the son of Mrs. Kerr’s husband;
+he had begun to build, successively, on each of these probabilities. But
+he had not foreseen this refusal to emerge from behind a non-committal
+mannerliness, or the long ray to be directed upon them that showed them
+all up, even Sydney, in the maze of a gnats’ dance, an aimless
+passionate jiggle apart and together. It had not been in Ronald to
+precipitate a crisis on any plane: he was not, thought Milton, either
+vivid or generous enough. He had come to stare, one could only imagine,
+and Milton had a view of him lounging along a row of cages. He wondered
+how much Ronald had hurt Sydney, whether she had been able to make him
+hurt her at all; though she had been so visibly “out” from the earliest
+word of his coming, to make a juggernaut of her friend’s son. Milton did
+not know whether, except for that brief encounter in the ball-room, they
+had exchanged a word. This reservation would be enough to engage this
+perverse girl in still deeper designs on Ronald and to make her, to
+merely a lover, more inaccessible than before.
+
+They climbed up to the skeleton of a summer house; the walls might have
+blown away or might simply have rotted. Miss Pym began to search about
+diligently, looking under the seat and into the corners and running the
+point of her walking-stick along the cracks of the pavement. She
+explained that “_they_” might have dropped something. This, for a
+moment, seemed so probable that Milton went just as eagerly down on one
+knee. “Think,” said she, “if one were to find a little purse, or a
+bangle that had slipped off, or even a button! I can’t believe they
+wouldn’t have left something; they must have come here day after day.”
+Milton laughed at her tolerantly, getting up again and dusting his knee.
+She didn’t explain why she should have concentrated her hopes on this
+arbour, she perhaps left the arbour to do so, for, perched out over the
+garden, it was as intimate as a nest. Mrs. Hillier sitting down
+dreamily, said, “It would have been a nice place for a proposal or
+something.”
+
+Another allusion to a technique he had disregarded! Milton said quickly,
+“But we wouldn’t understand—do you realize?—a word that has ever been
+said here!”
+
+“But people in the better-class Russian stories always seem to talk
+French or English.”
+
+“I can’t imagine anybody who wasn’t obliged to make love in English.”
+
+“I suppose,” said Mrs. Hillier looking at him thoughtfully, “that one
+only feels one’s own language a limitation if one is not sufficiently
+carried away.”
+
+“Oh!” cried Miss Pym, waving, “here is Eleanor coming up!” Mrs. Hillier
+said she did hope that she really were coming alone. “Though of course,”
+she added, “I should be sorry if Ronald had actually fallen into a tank
+or anything. Though one can’t say that it might not be for the best. For
+I can’t think what is going to become of him!”
+
+“I will go and look,” said Milton and, full of determination, left the
+arbour.
+
+Descending, he called Ronald everywhere: the silence that received his
+voice gave him back an infuriating sensation, less of being unheard than
+of not being answered. The boy might be round any corner listening
+compassionately, telling himself that there went poor old Milton
+hollering away. So he pressed on in a shut-down kind of silence and was
+surprised and aggrieved as at each turn the emptiness renewed itself
+down pergola, lawn or glade. A flitting echo of Mrs. Hillier’s remark
+sent him suddenly towards the gleam of water. There was no path, he had
+to push his way out through some bushes to the rim of a larger tank that
+had been cut out, a square of vivid green water, under the jut of a
+cliff. The tank had a curb of yellow marble and he saw looking across
+it, that the smooth streaked sides went down for about three feet before
+they came to the water, which might be lower than usual but gave some
+suggestion by its unmuddied yet complete opaqueness of being very deep.
+The water looked solid; if a body disappeared through the surface it
+might leave a dint perhaps, a gash which would slowly heal, but never a
+ripple. He could not imagine the green line swelling up or fretted for
+even a moment against the face of the marble. He leant further over it,
+after a glance up of instinctive watchfulness at the cliff which like a
+lid on a hinge had seemed at that very moment to lean further over him,
+and inwardly smiled at the picture he made, a fanciful composition to
+which his attitude and manner consciously lent themselves, that could be
+called “Temptation to Murder.” He saw his own head and shoulders
+reflected, and the cliff and sky (though none of these impinged on the
+greenness) and presently, after some recorded disturbances of branches,
+the figure of Ronald which, coming out from under the cliff, stood on
+the curb of the tank nonchalantly, then sat down, dangling its legs. “He
+might say something,” Milton thought resentfully, but after some seconds
+of silence whose duration seemed insulting and ludicrous, he had to
+throw a “Well, hullo!” across the water in impatient concession.
+
+“Hallo,” answered Ronald. “Exploring on your own?”
+
+“Yes—you too?”
+
+“Not quite,” said Ronald politely, “I’ve been exploring with Miss
+Fitzgerald.”
+
+“Biggest tank I’ve seen,” said Milton, nodding down.
+
+“Yes, isn’t it? More of a swimming bath.”
+
+“What an echo—it’s like talking to about ten people!”
+
+“Yes, it’s this cliff.”
+
+“Can’t you come round?” said Milton impatiently.
+
+“Beg your pardon?” asked Ronald and when the invitation had been
+repeated conveyed by his instant’s pause some surprise at it. He looked
+round the tank carefully but had to point out, with regret, that this
+seemed quite impossible owing to the way the bushes hung over. “But I
+daresay we’ll meet further on,” he said, “these curly paths are
+wonderfully good for meeting people. At least, so one would expect, but
+Miss Fitzgerald and I didn’t meet anybody. Not a ghost, even, though we
+were sure we would and were very anxious to.”
+
+“What have you done with Miss Fitzgerald?”
+
+“I think she went to find Miss Pym. I think perhaps she was lonely. You
+don’t believe, I hope, that I’ve dropped her into the tank?”
+
+“The way you haunt it does seem suspicious!”
+
+“But she’d have to come to the surface again: if I _had_, you know, I
+shouldn’t have dared come back. No, I came back for the tank itself—I
+like water.” Ronald, gripping the edge of the tank, leaned forward to
+watch with a smile the reflection of his dangling feet. Milton, sitting
+down opposite him, took out his pipe and lit it. He observed “You ought
+to have brought your mother—she would have liked this.”
+
+“She’s a bad walker—I don’t mean she’s got corns or a heart or anything;
+she’s just lazy.”
+
+“Or was not sorry, quite possibly, to get you off her hands for the
+morning,” laughed Milton with the bluff and stunning impertinence of
+which only the diffident are capable, and by which no one can be more
+appalled than themselves.
+
+“I daresay,” said Ronald. “One does get tired of people.” He gazed
+across thoughtfully, not at Milton but at Milton’s reflection, which he
+was able to watch without raising his eyes while remaining as
+impenetrable to his vis-à-vis as the water below him. “Such an
+intelligent girl—” he remarked—“that Miss Warren.”
+
+“Oh, you think so? Have you been talking?”
+
+“No,” said Ronald. “She is one of the few people in this caravanserai
+who have nothing to say to me. I would not say, you know, that she was
+one of those casual talkers. She would have, I imagine, her moments that
+she saves herself up for.”
+
+“She’s considered unfriendly.”
+
+“Oh! But would you want her to be friendly?”
+
+“It scarcely affects me—I have known her some time,” said Milton, making
+the slight reservation that Hotel time was reckoned quite differently.
+
+“Oh, really?” said Ronald respectfully. “You see, where I am concerned
+she doesn’t appeal as an enterprise. She is already ‘in the family.’”
+
+“Like an illness or a ghost?” suggested Milton, with a smile that must
+have been lost on Ronald since his faint image did not reproduce it.
+
+“More like a ghost, I think. She is to be seen on the stairs—still, I
+daresay, if my mother hasn’t already gone out with her.”
+
+“A hotel, you know, is a great place for friendships.”
+
+“Mustn’t that be,” said Ronald, “what people come out for?”
+
+“Perhaps some——”
+
+“But are there really people who would do that?” asked Ronald sharply,
+in a tone of revulsion, as though he had brought himself up more
+squarely than he had anticipated to the edge of some kind of abyss. “You
+mean women?”
+
+“Yes, I suppose so,” said Milton, smiling across at the agitation of
+Ronald, very secure and avuncular.
+
+“There is nothing now to prevent women being different,” said Ronald
+despondently, “and yet they seem to go on being just the same. What is
+the good of a new world if nobody can be got to come and live in it?”
+Sitting above his impassive and pale reflection, crumpled forward on his
+folded arms he remained immobile while the echoes of his last
+exclamation still seemed to hang about under the slant of rock that
+roofed him into a cave. The decay of the garden must have seemed to him
+for a dark instant to have profited nothing. Such a collapse at a mere
+glance at female frailty into the most profound despair suggested, more
+than loss of balance, a sharp assault from the rear by some malignant
+power. Milton justified his own silence, his unwillingness to go to the
+assistance of Ronald by a sense that this collapse had an austere
+fitness and that the garden had been after all fully entitled to revenge
+itself.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XVII
+
+
+The Patisserie had a dozen little blue tin tables dotted about under a
+happy-looking striped awning. Hither many people gravitated early in the
+day. Mrs. Kerr, who had insisted they should visit the shops, had for
+the last half-hour’s slow parade of the plate-glass given her companion
+about a quarter of her attention and a little less than her
+quarter-face. She had meanwhile chosen for Sydney and presented
+charmingly a string of dull amethysts, saying it seemed too good to be
+believable that they should be together once more. When she saw the
+little tables and the English people round them sitting sideways and
+eating patisserie off the tips of their forks with an amused air of
+concession, she exclaimed with pleasure and her attention became
+entirely distracted. The scene appeared to delight her and she
+concentrated her delight into each of the smiling nods she sent across
+to acquaintances.
+
+“Do look, Sydney—how civilized!”
+
+“How greedy!” said Sydney, who was trying to direct her friend to the
+older end of the town where she would at least find nothing but fruit
+shops.
+
+“Yes, that’s just what I mean—how civilized! Anybody can eat at
+mealtimes. Come over—oh Sydney, we must!”
+
+“But we’re not hungry!”
+
+“No, of course we’re not.” Mrs. Kerr propping up her parasol against a
+table positively beamed. The table was as small as a mushroom between
+them; she looked helplessly at her handbag, then passed it over to
+Sydney to be disposed of and drawing off her gloves eagerly looked round
+to see what other people were eating. “I’m so seldom allowed to do this.
+Ronald is spending his own sort of morning—a very genuine dead villa—the
+Riviera, you see, is so tiny—” (she tapped the table) “so why shouldn’t
+I?”
+
+“I never knew this _was_ your sort of morning. We might often have come
+here.”
+
+“I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr, “that I hardly liked to suggest it. I could
+never, of course, suggest it to Ronald.—Oh, Vermouth? You are ascetic! I
+should like some chocolate. Will you drink very slowly, then we shan’t
+have to go.”
+
+“Oh! But weren’t we——?”
+
+“But where is there to go? And I mean, why should we? But of course, my
+dear, I will go anywhere. This is really your morning. If I didn’t spoil
+you, you would never come near me now. I don’t know what you’ve been
+doing; I never see you—Oh, look, there’s Veronica Lawrence with that
+dreadful young man. What unnatural tastes she’s got: why doesn’t she run
+after Ronald?”
+
+“It would be very discouraging.”
+
+“I don’t see why it should be; Ronald’s rather susceptible.”
+
+Mrs. Kerr, her folded hands on the table, sat looking sideways;
+absorbed. “He is looking at her with the most awful expression, with
+cream on his chin. Isn’t passion debasing? Tell me, Sydney, are that
+couple engaged?”
+
+“Oh, probably.” Sydney looked conscious.
+
+“Oh, does she tell _you_ these things?” asked Mrs. Kerr curiously. “What
+a queer friendship! Does she show how tremendously sorry she is for you
+or is she too deep? What does she say about me? It would amuse me to
+know.”
+
+“But why should we discuss you?”
+
+“I can’t think. But you must talk personalities, surely.... Isn’t she
+really rather a common little thing?”
+
+“She rather attracts me.”
+
+“Oh, if she only _attracts_ you.... It matters much more whom one likes.
+Will you look for a plate and choose us both some patisserie—nothing too
+sweet?” Sydney with a dazzled blank feeling got up indecisively. “You
+know what I like—you’ve an instinct.” Mrs. Kerr looking up for a moment
+let her general vague smile quickly be personal, and gave Sydney a
+glimpse of her old mood, fleetingly, yet so that to turn away was an
+agony. “Do go, won’t you?” she urged, with such a promise implicit that
+the coming back would be memorable that Sydney left her forthwith,
+slipping between the chairbacks to the shop door and the crowded
+counter.
+
+Here, moving up and down thoughtfully, she found herself elbow to elbow
+with Victor who, fork in one hand and plate in the other, was also
+selecting and in a practised manner spearing patisserie.
+
+“Oh, hullo!” said he as she hesitated. “Can I help you in any way? I
+know all these pretty well. Don’t go for the coffee kind, they look
+first-rate but they’re hollow. Do you mind if I take the last green one?
+Veronica’s fearfully keen on them. We come here a lot.”
+
+“So Veronica told me.”
+
+“Yes, by Jove, she did, didn’t she?” said Victor, remembering. “I say,
+look here, don’t wish me the usual—I feel perfectly rotten.”
+
+“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Sydney. Her sympathy necessarily lacked direction,
+because Victor was the sort of young man who continues to move about
+uneasily while talking and to talk for a long time without looking
+straight at one.
+
+“Still, one’s only young once,” remarked Victor, and roamed away down
+the counter. Later on, she followed him out through the door, which he
+blocked for her by a moment’s misgiving as to the ultimate excellence of
+his choice.
+
+Mrs. Kerr had discovered herself back-to-back with a friend and had
+turned to converse with her. The friend was animated, Mrs. Kerr
+sympathetic. Sydney stood a moment to watch them.
+
+“_Delicious!_” exclaimed the friend, a dark, vivid lady from another
+hotel whose party, a broken-up circle, sat listening all at a loss and
+turned now and then a long stare of timid resentment on the brilliant
+intruder.
+
+“_Absolutely_ delicious!” agreed Mrs. Kerr, then, catching sight of
+Sydney, broke off still laughing and faced round once more to her table.
+“You’ve been ages, my darling,” she cried, “have you brought the whole
+shop?”
+
+Sydney put down her plate on the table, showed with a gesture what
+exactly she had brought and silently began sipping her vermouth. “That
+‘darling’ must have been Ronald,” she thought. “What a habit of mind he
+is!” “Do relations become a habit?” she asked. “I have so few.”
+
+“I daresay they might,” said Mrs. Kerr very kind but abstracted. “What a
+pity you’ve got so few”—she sampled the patisserie. “I mean after all,
+home life—Why don’t you marry, Sydney?”
+
+“I thought we’d been into that.”
+
+“Yes, but it does worry me rather,” said Mrs. Kerr and turned upon her
+friend’s downcast pallour a profound, limpid and prettily conventional
+stare.
+
+A sharp movement of Sydney’s foot shook the table, the china leaped on
+the tin. “Well, if you’ll keep Ronald a year or two——”
+
+“Sydney!” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr in a low voice, paused for a moment and
+put down her fork. “Don’t be so, so ugly! It’s like—I don’t know what
+it’s like: it’s not like _you_. I wish you hadn’t made these common
+friends; I wish there’d been more girls of your own sort. When the very
+essence of you is delicacy and fineness and, well, breeding, this
+horrible veneer that you’ve affected lately seems so.... Well, it may be
+what you’d call in ‘a grim kind of way funny,’ but——”
+
+“_This_ seems in a grim kind of way funny,” said Sydney. “It’s like
+being given tea by an aunt at the Zoo.”
+
+“I only wish you had been taken more to the Zoo! It seems from the way
+you sometimes talk that your friends must be common in the worst kind of
+way—exotic! You’ve distressed even Ronald, though he is as a rule
+neither observant nor critical; he said you were so unnatural, and
+though at the time I was angry with him, I must say that when you talk
+in that tone I should find you difficult to defend to anybody.”
+
+“I’m sorry Ronald can’t like me.”
+
+“Oh, I think that’s putting it too strongly,” Mrs. Kerr said gently.
+“Perhaps I have put everything too strongly—Sydney darling, don’t sit
+there in that queer stiff way as though you had swallowed something:
+people will notice.... You know how reprehensible I am, how I do like my
+friends to be pleasant. I would never have said anything if you hadn’t
+shown your teeth at me; I wouldn’t for worlds have spoilt our morning.
+But we won’t let it, will we?... Look, eat one of those little flaky
+things you’ve brought, they look delicious.”
+
+Sydney, trying to get down a mouthful of pastry that had become like
+sawdust, had a sense of being widely yet concentratedly glared at,
+though whether she had really attracted attention or this were merely
+the sun striking down through the awning she did not dare to determine.
+Certainly the conversations around had subsided and the general turning
+away of eyes from their table, the fixed stares, across the street or
+back into the shop or down on to plates, of which with a glance round
+she had assured herself, were elaborate enough to be studied. Little
+staccato remarks here and there seemed to prick up through a tensity.
+She suspected that Mrs. Kerr, by her unusually bland expression of
+basking in reverie, the unconcern of her movements and her solicitude
+that Sydney should finish her pastry, must “be passing off” something.
+Sydney in an effort to further this continued to eat pastry quickly, in
+spite of a frightened feeling each time that she might not be able to
+swallow. She could not help a shaken kind of exaltedness such as a child
+feels when it has upset a table of china.
+
+Presently she let herself fall back on an outside consciousness of their
+both being well-dressed, distinguished-looking and leisurely, and
+thought how plainly this must appear from the other side of the street
+and how if she were someone else she would stand on the pavement and
+look across at them. She would admire their graceful air of being
+friends, of being completed by one another, and go away distracted by a
+memory of them both sitting there in the temperate shade of the awning.
+“I think,” she said conversationally, affected by the thought of this
+admiration, “that this is a very good way of filling up a morning
+abroad.”
+
+“_I_ think so.... Shall we look for some carnations? Shall I buy some
+for you?”
+
+“Shall I buy some for Ronald?” Sydney looked into Mrs. Kerr’s face with
+a smile, but impersonally, as though it were a picture. Mrs. Kerr seemed
+to meet something hard in her eyes, for she raised an eyebrow
+infinitesimally.
+
+“He would love that, it would be quite new to him. I don’t think people
+like to give him things usually. He doesn’t, I daresay, give the
+impression of being in any sense very receptive. Poor Ronald, I wish he
+could learn to be likable. I thought once that you might have done
+something for him, but I don’t see now that you very well can.”
+
+This little dead maternal design she laid out before Sydney with naïveté
+and appeared to consider forlornly but with beautiful resignation.
+Sydney, startled by its appearance, sat speechless and looked at her
+friend whose unreproachableness quietly accused her. “I know,” said Mrs.
+Kerr, apparently going off at a tangent and looking down so that there
+was nothing but the movement of her eyelids and the modulations of her
+light voice to give point to what she was saying, “that I haven’t
+professed to believe a word of all you have, both of you, so expansively
+and delightfully told me about life. I haven’t a grasp of abstractions,
+and life, when you mean the theory of living, is an abstraction, surely?
+You know I’ve been flippant and difficult but at least I did try to be
+honest—I _didn’t_ believe. But my dear, I have so intensely wanted to: I
+could have prayed (if ever one did) for either of you to justify
+yourselves or, best of all, both of you. I’ve never professed that
+anything could transcend the conventions; you have. Well, you’ve
+insisted passionately that an understanding is possible between a young
+man and young woman, that you can remain quite un-bothered, without
+electricity or diffidence. Ronald’s insisted too. When I’ve said ‘Well
+then?’ at intervals, you’ve both waved your arms and declared that you
+couldn’t produce, at the moment, the right kind of person to demonstrate
+with. Well, here you both are and I’m waiting. Has it been too
+matter-of-fact of me? Possibilities burgeoned and I’m here waiting for
+the most idyllic relationship to spring into flower. Can you wonder I’m
+disappointed and cynical—it’s been a poor kind of triumph—at having had
+to watch you two resolving yourselves into just such an ordinary state
+of suspicion and watchfulness and elaborate antipathy as might precede
+the most normal attraction in which the heart of a biologist could
+rejoice?” She laughed deprecatingly; the whole idea of such attraction
+seemed to be distasteful to her. “I’ve talked a long time,” she said,
+“rather confusedly, and had to use several words that I rather dislike.
+What I might have asked shortly—since it’s all really that I wanted to
+know is: Why ever can’t you and Ronald be friends?”
+
+Mrs. Kerr’s hand that lay with casually spread-out fingers under
+Sydney’s eyes along the edge of the table, had some vague connection
+with her personality but neither seemed to have anything to do with what
+had been said. The amazed Sydney could not reconcile them.
+
+“Do you mean what you’ve just been saying?” she said doubtfully. “Do you
+really believe what you’ve just said? Did much really stand or fall on
+our making a success of things—I and Ronald?”
+
+“So it did seem to me,” said Mrs. Kerr also looking slightly bewildered
+as though by all these questions Sydney were confusing the issue.
+
+“Did you think you had helped us?”
+
+“Only by ... valuing both of you.”
+
+“I suppose,” said Sydney, struck by this, “you do in a kind of way value
+us?”
+
+“Yes,” said Mrs. Kerr, “and I’ve missed _you_ very much. When I had to
+throw away your carnations this morning I was sorry: I didn’t a bit want
+to.”
+
+“Only this morning? Carnations do last a long time,” said Sydney and
+considered the phenomenon gravely. “One didn’t want to intrude, you
+see,” she added.
+
+“Intrude?” said Mrs. Kerr, repeating the rather middle-class word
+wonderingly. Her gentle, mystified air was not sympathetic. “I think,”
+she said slowly, as though trying how best to express herself to an
+almost strange young woman, the school friend, as it might be, of a
+daughter, “that you’ve been a little ... over-important about it
+perhaps, haven’t you? I mean, how could your coming or not coming make
+any difference between me and Ronald? He would have been pleased; he was
+ready to be friendly; he knows just what you’ve been to me, and in his
+own tied-up sort of way he is ever so grateful. He likes me to have
+friends wherever I am. I don’t think,” she concluded, with a smile of
+pity for the girl’s inevitable uncomprehension, “that anybody could put
+things wrong between me and Ronald.”
+
+“In fact, one seems to have taken too much for granted. Exaggerated of
+one! Funny!” said Sydney and laughed.
+
+“Oh, Sydney dear, no. Why? Don’t be so bitter.”
+
+“Why bitter? I see how tiresome a girl can be.”
+
+“Never tiresome, you’ve been charming; more than unselfish—giving up so
+much of your time to me, giving me so much—I’ve accepted too much I’m
+afraid.” Mrs. Kerr broke off with compunction.
+
+“Why reproach yourself: don’t you find all your friends are the same?”
+
+Mrs. Kerr sighed and looked down at her hands, allowing this to pass for
+an admission. With a smile of particular ruefulness, that drew up the
+eyebrows tragically and brought the face to its fullest profoundest
+expression of all of her, she confessed: “But in your case I’ve been
+specially guilty. I begin now to guess you’ve expected much more of me
+and that I’ve been taking and taking without so much as a glance ahead
+or a single suspicion of what you would want to have back. I’m afraid
+we’ve gone wrong through your not quite understanding. You see I’m so
+fond of you, but——”
+
+“But?”
+
+“Well, simply but! I mean, there is nothing else there. It has always
+seemed to me simple to like people and right to be liked, but I never
+can feel that much more is involved—is it? I have a horror, I think, of
+not being, and of my friends not being, quite perfectly balanced. I
+think moderation in everything—but perhaps I am cold.... Will you take
+my purse now—if you won’t eat any more?—and go in and pay for the
+cakes?”
+
+To Sydney the cumulative effect of this succession of touches
+(especially the last: herself brandishing with commercial insistence a
+long bill that her bewildered debtor felt unable to meet) was one of
+vulgarity. The attribution to herself of an irritable sex-consciousness
+vis-à-vis to Ronald did not hurt but sharply offended. Mrs. Kerr,
+however, sitting there with her half-smile, her evident deprecation of
+the interlude, her invincible air of fastidiousness, had maintained her
+own plane whereon “vulgarity” would be meaningless. Sydney could only
+suppose that cruelty, as supremely disinterested as art, had like art
+its own purity which could transcend anything and consecrate the nearest
+material to its uses.
+
+The friend sitting back to back with Mrs. Kerr had gone away minutes
+ago; the little blue tables one by one were deserted. The business of
+the Patisserie wilted temporarily before the approach of lunch-time.
+Surprised by this isolation, as though the trees of a wood had melted
+away from round them, the two left the shade of the awning and stood
+dazzled for a moment looking vaguely up and down the street.
+
+“Where now?” said Mrs. Kerr and laid a hand on Sydney’s sleeve in her
+anxiety to be directed. Sydney could make no suggestion, she remembered
+they were on an edge of Europe and had an impulse in the still active
+top of her mind to suggest Prague, the Hook, or Rouen. The facility with
+which it would be possible for her to cover larger distances and her
+present complete inability to move from the kerbstone presented
+themselves simultaneously. She could not command the few words, the few
+movements which should take her away from Mrs. Kerr; or imagine where,
+having escaped, she would find a mood, room, place, even country to
+offer her sanctuary. Her home environment, apart from which the crisis
+of to-day, of these last weeks, had produced itself, was seen very
+clearly at this distance away from it but presented an impenetrable
+façade with no ingress. She could see her life very plainly but there
+seemed no way back into it, the whole thing might have been painted on
+canvas with a clever enough but not convincing appearance of reality.
+
+She thought, “So there is really nothing to go back to,” and said,
+gently drawing her arm away from Mrs. Kerr: “I think, if you don’t mind
+I’ll go back to the Hotel.”
+
+
+
+
+                                 XVIII
+
+
+Mrs. Lee-Mittison brought their _Continental Daily Mail_ down to the
+lounge with her and sat on it. She did not wish to read it herself and
+did not dare to put it down beside her because she knew that someone
+would come up and ask just to glance at it—people so soon lose their
+delicacy in these little matters. They would rumple it up and take the
+creases out; Mrs. Lee-Mittison knew so few people who could look at a
+paper without rumpling it. Whenever anybody strolled through the lounge
+with the air of exhausted resources peculiar to this half-hour before
+lunch-time, she knitted faster than ever and looked unconscious. Life
+had developed in Mrs. Lee-Mittison a fine set of jungle instincts; she
+could apprehend and be rigid before, looking over her glasses, she had
+actually discerned with her usual mildness the approach of the
+predatory.
+
+“I do wonder if there is any news this morning,” said somebody (one of
+the talkers) drifting about with her wool-work and looking distastefully
+at each of the chairs. “There seems to me to have been no news for a
+long time.”
+
+“I _do_ wonder,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison truthfully. She did not as much
+as glance at a headline before Herbert had done so—Herbert was upstairs
+taking off his boots.
+
+“It’s very odd, nothing definite seems to happen at all—I mean, of
+course, there is always Politics but that goes on and on and on so, one
+begins to lose interest. Especially out here where one cannot see what
+effect they are having, though one does doubt really whether they do
+have any effect.”
+
+“There’s been that pit disaster.”
+
+“Miners,” said the lady distastefully, “always seem to be getting into
+trouble. One is so sorry, but it is difficult to go on and on
+sympathizing, especially out here where one gets on just as well without
+them—they burn wood, you know, and do everything else by electricity.”
+
+Mrs. Lee-Mittison began to count her stitches audibly—“Do excuse me,”
+she said, “but I am turning the heel—Oh, good morning, Mr. Milton. Back
+from the Villa?”
+
+Mr. Milton, looking nicer, more unconcerned than when he had first come
+out and burnt to a pleasant brick-colour, bowed and sat down at one of
+the writing-tables. “Letters to write before lunch,” he explained
+politely, unscrewing the top of his pen. It did not yet seem to him
+courteous to ignore the ladies he found in the lounge without making
+some excuse for himself; life, however, had to be lived somewhere, so he
+had acquired the trick of explaining parenthetically. “Chapter to
+finish.” “Must keep up one’s philosophy....” “Ever read Jacks?...”
+“Working out this beastly acrostic ...” or (showing a bundle of letters)
+“Must just see what my friends’ve got to say....”
+
+For a moment or two his pen worked slowly, conscious of the formation of
+each letter as though the two ladies had been leaning over his shoulder;
+then he settled himself square on his elbows and his pen flew. He stuck
+out his long legs at either side of the writing-table which was small
+and rickety, a rubber-shod heel tapped the floor noiselessly; he gave
+both ladies the impression of being a person of affairs. “I do wonder,”
+thought Mrs. Lee-Mittison, “whether he will ever be a bishop.... I do
+wish he would cut off his moustache; I’m sure it gives people the wrong
+impression. If he were a bishop he would have to. Perhaps if he were
+married he would too. If I were married to him....”
+
+Mrs. Lee-Mittison, who was not otherwise unmodest, often married herself
+imaginatively to men she took an interest in, then reviewed the
+possibilities of such a union. “I would do something for his hair at the
+back,” she thought. “I am certain that is accidental baldness, not
+hereditary. If only it could be taken in time....” The lady with the
+wool embroidery opened her mouth: a torrent of conversation seemed to be
+coming. Mrs. Lee-Mittison held up an admonitory knitting-needle.
+“Hsssh,” said she, and the lady with the embroidery moved off haughtily
+to the other end of the lounge. Milton, towards whom she glanced
+solicitously made no sign, he had missed this bye-play. He blotted one
+sheet with such force that the writing-table trembled, and began
+another.
+
+Mr. Lee-Mittison came downstairs and sitting down carefully reached out
+for the newspaper. Its folds were by now so immaculate that it undid
+with the suddenness of a pocket-map. Every time a door opened and shut
+he looked over the top of the paper; he did not say anything but always
+stared in the same way, quite impartially; nobody was allowed to feel
+that their coming in and out did not matter, he did not challenge what
+they were doing but liked to be sure that they had some good reason for
+doing it and were not entirely irresponsible.
+
+“Here,” he said to his wife, “is Miss Sydney. Good morning, Miss
+Sydney.”
+
+“Good morning, Miss Warren,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison, who was at pains to
+waylay anybody in whom Herbert might be interested.
+
+“Good morning,” said Sydney, looking as though she had expected to find
+the lounge quite crowded and to push her way through it.
+
+“You’re in early, you know,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison, “you must have
+miscalculated. It’s seven minutes past twelve. What have you done with
+Mrs. Kerr and the boy?”
+
+“Ronald has been with our party,” said Milton, “up at the Villa.”
+Sydney, standing on the mat vaguely, was looking towards him as though
+she had something to ask. He had an instinct to go over to her, with an
+urgent feeling that it lay with him to do something he could not at the
+moment recall. The glass doors behind and beside her flashing as they
+opened and shut, the staircase going up and down and doubling off at
+angles into oblivion and the way the lift came sliding down the shaft to
+wait behind the latticed gates were all like so much expressionist
+scenery, emphasizing the effect she gave of being distracted, mechanical
+and at a standstill.
+
+He did not like the Lee-Mittisons to see her so much at a loss and even
+hoped that he might distract their attention by his own awkwardness,
+which he felt to be palpable, as he towered, his hands on a chairback,
+over the writing-table, not quite liking to sit down again. The
+Lee-Mittisons were startled, obviously, by her so uncharacteristic
+willingness—it seemed eagerness—to linger there and to bestow herself
+upon them; she was known to proceed from point to point in her days with
+a high impatience and without hesitancy. They repeated that she had come
+back very early and asked her to sit down with them. She came over,
+smiling.
+
+“Look,” she cried, “at my beautiful new beads! They were a present this
+morning—Mrs. Kerr gave them to me.” She took off the beads and passed
+them round to her friends who held them up to the light and exclaimed at
+the colour. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she repeated, as though she could
+not yet be satisfied with everybody’s praise.
+
+“Beautiful,” Milton said obediently, weighing the beads in his hand and
+hating the amethysts. He gave them back with an appearance of reluctance
+and thought: she had been valued at so-much, just these were what she
+was worth. He watched her slip them over her head again and turn in a
+kind of glittering animation, like a poplar in a gale, to Mrs.
+Lee-Mittison. “I have always wanted amethysts—dreamed of them!” she
+declared, and fingered the beads restlessly.
+
+“Very nice of your friend Mrs. Kerr,” said Mrs. Lee-Mittison; thinking
+nothing or everything, watching the heel carefully, knitting away. Mr.
+Lee-Mittison who had never given Sydney credit for being so good looking
+decided to have a good look at her, turned half round in his chair and
+crossed his legs comfortably in order to do so. “Who’s a lucky girl!”
+said he and wagged a forefinger. “Won’t this be a day to remember?” Her
+poise, her air of being caught-up admitted this; she laughed and looked
+over at Milton. “Don’t go!” said she as with a keen sense of humiliation
+on her behalf and an instinct to escape from all this he was gathering
+up his papers. “Stay and tell us about the Villa—do stay!”
+
+He was to be haunted—during an afternoon in which he avoided her
+sedulously—by this ineffaceable new impression of her making a free
+presentation of herself to all comers. Heaven forbid, he thought, she
+should be “charming!” Her lack of “charm” had from the first been
+distinct to him; it was a quality more than negative, she had a kind of
+starkness that enforced itself on his judgment as “good,” like the
+starkness of Norman architecture. It pleased him—he was frank enough to
+admit this as vanity—to hear her spoken of as ungracious, unforthcoming,
+frigid, even as repellent. He was accustomed to let himself in alone, as
+it were, to his large, dark, lofty conception of her with a strong
+sense, to forbid a possible oppression, of his own singularity as well
+as of hers. “I don’t want her like that,” he thought angrily, as looking
+down from his window about three o’clock he watched her noisy
+setting-out for the tennis-courts with a party of the Lawrences and
+their friends. “That’s not the girl who wouldn’t marry me,” he thought
+and it was his sharpest criticism of her; for it was that passage on the
+town bench high up in the sunshine which had given him till now his pang
+of pride in her, his clearest feeling of her being incomplete and so
+beyond the doom of limitation. She had offered herself as a break in
+what seemed, as he was growing older, a general closing-down of
+horizons. “She mustn’t be like this,” he said in his desperation and, to
+hide her, clattered the shutters together and turned away. He felt that
+most profound concern possible for another human being, when it becomes
+a question no longer of the extent of one’s own possession of them, but,
+transcending this, of what in their untouchable selves they _are_.
+
+He went for a walk up the hill to the back of the villas, along the
+precarious terraces from which the town looked small and the coast, in
+spite of its uniform blueness, disordered and desolate. Having stared
+for some time at all this, and at the unshadowed horizon with never a
+boat, without any sense of having been enlarged or inspirited he came
+down again hurriedly by a steep direct way, slithering on the baked
+earth and sending stone after stone from beneath him bounding and
+crashing to what seemed the imminent peril of the colony below. In such
+a manner he descended to the tennis-courts and, exceedingly loath to go
+in, stood staring through the wire-netting and dusting the earth from
+his hands. To his relief and chagrin he could not see Sydney anywhere,
+his day bade fair to have simplified itself and he contemplated his
+future, over which an afternoon still to be filled up seemed to stretch
+enormously, with a proper sense of reprieve but without appetite. One
+had to amuse oneself, but he did not see the necessity.
+
+At a point in his reflections she must have come up behind him
+inaudibly, for her voice said abruptly, “Do you _never_ play
+now-a-days?” He faced round guiltily and saw her, buttoned to the chin
+in a blazer stridently flame-colour, with hands deep in the pockets,
+less like herself of the morning than a rather aggrieved little boy.
+
+“I never see _you_ here when I do.”
+
+“I used to play once,” said Sydney. “I could play—I can’t any more.
+Shall we walk somewhere?” With an expression of being still, though with
+greater indifference, at anybody’s disposal, she nodded backward
+indefinitely in the direction of the hills.
+
+A silence, descending on them abruptly, protracted itself from minute to
+minute as he followed her up the path. She held herself taut upright,
+nervously, her racket sticking out from under her arm. Her vivid blazer
+hurt his eyes in the glare, he had always to be looking away from her.
+She was not like the woman in the swinging white cloak with whom he had
+come this way in the advancing twilight on an evening when there had
+been some kind of a shock, when he had been startled—perhaps by a wild
+gash of light on some rocks. He recalled his own shiver, the shiver
+about him in the very dark trees; something must have been immanent. The
+path, the trees, their very contiguity seemed to be haunted; he wanted
+to catch up the girl ahead and put out a hand to her for comfort at this
+crisis of regret and nostalgia.
+
+“Where shall we go?” he asked and she cried without turning round,
+without, clearly, a thought for him, “Oh, anywhere, just down the road.
+Not far or I’ll die!”
+
+They went forward more hurriedly till, with a sense of escape from a
+funnel, they came out into the road. Here, pausing, she looked up and
+down; nothing beckoned in either direction though she continued to stand
+alert as though a paradisiacal perspective should have opened up for
+them. It was the same road, not to be changed for her, with its double
+rank of trees, its villa gates somnolently ajar and its same air of
+stretching mildly ahead to be sauntered down. The chestnuts already were
+budding; soon, sign that the visitors must be gone, they would arch the
+road over with their interknit fingery leaves. The air about them was
+gummy, smelling faintly of spring. He caught his breath sharply—was this
+moment also, like that other, slipping away to torment him?
+
+“I shall be sorry,” he said, “when we’re gone. One might easily be so
+happy here. It can’t, while one’s here, be impossible. It will be fatal
+to go. The thought of those leaves coming out has a kind of taint about
+it, like autumn.”
+
+She looked at him doubtfully with a twitch of the lips at the thought
+that might well have been scorn. “Mr. Milton,” she asked, “do you still
+want to marry me?”
+
+“Let’s walk on,” he said quickly, “don’t let’s just—just stand here....
+Either way—this way then. _Oughtn’t_ we, don’t you think, to walk on?”
+
+“Do please try and answer,” said she. “You embarrass me fearfully.” An
+instinct made him catch at her elbow and guide her, as they walked, as
+though between puddles. He felt her elbow shake.
+
+“You know I love you,” he said, and was startled by the ring of this
+avowal, the certainty. “Sydney, Sydney,” he sighed and felt at the back
+of his closed eyes her white face and dark eyes looking up.
+
+He looked at her again and for a moment she was nothing but a girl,
+talking. “I will marry you,” she was saying then, “I do want to.”
+
+Why was she quick to assure him of this? He met her eyes square,
+searching up for him; eyes nearly black, overcharged, impenetrable,
+crying out to be read. “You don’t love me?” he said.—“I mean, do you?”
+
+“Oh, no.” She seemed appalled at the misapprehension, but her elbow,
+rigid in his slackening grasp, asked not to be relinquished. “But you
+know, I do want to,” she said.
+
+“My dear Sydney....” Saying this, he turned to look, instinctively, up
+and down the empty road.
+
+“Yes, you could kiss me here,” she said, “if there’s nobody coming.” He
+stooped quickly and kissed her.
+
+“I think there _was_ somebody,” she laughed a moment afterwards, with
+embarrassment, “looking through the gate of that villa. Shall we walk on
+looking rather ordinary?” After a little of this “ordinary” walking on
+she asked with anxiety, “You did _really_ want to marry, didn’t you?”
+
+“How can you ask me that; can’t you see?” he exclaimed in torture.
+
+“Anyhow,” she said, “even if I couldn’t see, it wouldn’t, would it—now I
+have accepted you—be really a fair thing to ask?”
+
+Mrs. Lee-Mittison, coming out cautiously through the garden gate of the
+villa where she—(such a nice introduction!—) had been returning a call,
+stood back for some time between the gateposts, a corner of her
+card-case pressed against her lips, to watch them down the road.
+
+“Such a little slip of a thing ... I don’t think she _understands_,”
+said Mrs. Lee-Mittison.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XIX
+
+
+Dr. Lawrence talked of taking his daughters away from the Hotel. “I
+quite agree,” he had said, looking at Victor disdainfully, “that my
+daughter Veronica must marry somebody, but I fail to see any reason why
+she should marry you.” This had seemed an unnecessarily disagreeable way
+of putting things. Dr. Lawrence wore yellow spectacles out-of-doors
+where the interview had taken place; these gave him the advantage of
+looking sinister. An abrupt man, Victor thought, not at all the sort of
+person one would care to consult if one needed to visit a heart
+specialist. In spite of all the tennis and dancing Victor was beginning
+to put on flesh out here; he felt that Dr. Lawrence had noticed this; he
+had just borrowed twenty pounds from his father and this he felt that
+Dr. Lawrence knew. It had all been rather awkward. Veronica did what she
+could; she admitted to Victor that her father was a bit of a beast, and
+to her father that Victor was a bit of an idiot, then retired to bed for
+two days announcing that she had a headache. Dr. Lawrence entered into
+correspondence with some hotels on the French Riviera but they were full
+up: the affair hung fire.
+
+“Our father,” Eileen Lawrence told Colonel Duperrier, “has got a
+devastating way of taking the starch out of things for us. We often fear
+that we shall die unmarried.”
+
+“Oh ... surely?” Colonel Duperrier was much concerned. “I thought,” he
+said, “that girls could do pretty much what they wanted to now-a-days. I
+should have thought any of _you_ could.” He was entertaining Veronica’s
+sisters, after tennis, at the English tea-gardens; they sat together in
+a triangle round a small expectant table under a lemon tree. The
+declining sun made the girls’ arms and faces coral-pink and their
+dresses gold; Colonel Duperrier regretted more than ever that he had no
+nieces.
+
+“We could,” said Eileen, “if we ever really wanted to do anything for
+long enough. But everything is undermined by other people’s damned
+subtleties—especially father’s. ‘Oh, of course, do it if you like, my
+dear,’ he says and looks at one as though one were diseased. ‘If you are
+so _very_ keen to, if you really think it is worth _while_.’ You see,
+one’s put at once in such an impossible position, having to be ‘very
+keen.’ It makes one so inferior to father, who is never keen on
+anything. Especially when it is a question of any of us marrying any of
+these young men—though it is the same thing with any career any of us
+ever want to take up: we do feel it must be an advantage to a girl to
+have some kind of career though she might not want to stick to it. And
+no young man, if one cares to look at it dispassionately, is worth all
+the fuss father expects us to make about him. Then father sighs and
+says, ‘Well, I’m afraid if you don’t feel more strongly than _that_
+about it—’ and one looks so feeble. Our father,” said Eileen “is most
+fearfully subtle. No wonder he’s a specialist.”
+
+“But I don’t think specialists need be subtle in _that_ way,” said Joan
+with an eye on Colonel Duperrier, who appeared surprised.
+
+“One is tempted to wish,” observed Eileen, “that, for purposes of
+marriage at least, one hadn’t got a father at all, like Sydney Warren.
+Though in her case, anyway, it would be difficult to kick up a fuss. I
+must say, if Sydney really did want to get married—and she never gave me
+a bit that impression—it was very business-like of her to pick out
+anybody as eligible as dear old Milton. But then Sydney is a very
+precise sort of business-like girl. She was going, you know, to be a
+doctor.”
+
+“I had no idea,” said Colonel Duperrier.
+
+“_I_ think she’s cold-blooded,” said Joan, “she gives me the creeps
+rather. And I don’t think she’s a bit suitable for a clergyman’s wife: I
+can just see her looking disdainfully at the churchwardens and people.”
+
+“She’ll make an excellent bishop’s wife,” said Colonel Duperrier. “All
+the bishops’ wives I have met were very disdainful. She’ll look very
+handsome, too, in kind of black satiny garments, twenty or thirty years
+hence.”
+
+“The Honourable Mrs. Pinkerton would prevent his ever being a bishop,”
+said Eileen. “How she does hate him! She would bring it up against him
+just when he was going to be elected that he had once taken somebody
+else’s bath. It’s a pity, because Sydney would look very well in black,
+rather hard satin when she’s about forty-five, much more herself than
+she does now, here. Isn’t it funny that for everybody there seems to be
+just one age at which they are _really_ themselves? I mean, there are
+women you meet who are obviously born to be twenty (and pretty at that)
+and who seem to have lost their way since, and men you do wish you’d
+known when they were say, thirty, or twenty-four or feel sorry you
+mayn’t come across them when they’re forty or fifty-five, and children
+like that horrid little Cordelia who are simply shaping up to be pale,
+sarcastic women of twenty-nine and who won’t, once they’re that, ever
+grow any older.”
+
+Joan Lawrence looked dreamy; when the tray was set down and Colonel
+Duperrier asked her to pour out tea and do hostess she blushed and
+looked very much startled. She had had a glimpse of herself and Colonel
+Duperrier having breakfast together on some verandah out in the Tropics,
+face to face with one another over a dish of some very large,
+futurist-looking fruit. She was not sure of her tropical background, she
+did not travel or read much, so it was sketched in vaguely; there was,
+as here, a profusion of heliotrope that coloured the scene and their
+silence, for they did not seem to be moving or saying anything. She was
+being looked at ... he had taken off his topee. She was wearing white
+muslin; embroidered, be-ribboned, diaphanous; she did not think she was
+wearing what was strictly speaking a frock.... What a thing to imagine:
+what an unspeakable liberty to have taken with Colonel Duperrier! She
+clattered the lid of the tea-pot, poured boiling water over her fingers,
+did not dare think any longer and did not know where to look.
+
+“You don’t like sugar, do you, Colonel Duperrier?”
+
+“Thank you, no sugar, and I don’t like very much milk.”
+
+She had guessed this, she had known _instinctively_ that he would not
+take very much milk.
+
+“This Hotel,” said Eileen, “seems to be producing brides in very large
+quantities. What a pity we have used up all the men. Do you think any
+others are likely to come out, Colonel Duperrier?”
+
+“I can’t think.” He was wishing it were not impossible to take the
+Lawrences out separately. This would be all very well if he were simply
+taking out Eileen. But Joan had withdrawn from the tea-party, she sat
+and looked a long way away; he felt cheated of her. “I must say,” he
+went on with an effort, smiling round affably, “I think this would be an
+excellent _place_ to be in love, engaged and so on. It’s a pity we don’t
+most of us come out here till we’re elderly.” The tea-garden did for an
+instant flash on him a something half remembered or never quite
+visualized, with its lit-up lawns, its bulging gold lemons and oranges
+hanging down in the sun. His companions smiled. “All this,” he said,
+“would be ever so jolly.”
+
+“Where were you in love?” asked Joan. “I mean, what was the scenery?”
+Tilting back her head, her hands clasped under her chin she gazed with a
+limpidity that might well have been mischievous beyond him and into the
+sunshine.
+
+“What a thing to ask!” Eileen cried saucily. “Colonel Duperrier
+travelled a lot.”
+
+Colonel Duperrier at this moment of nervousness and surprise did seem to
+himself to have travelled a long way. His thoughts went back through the
+conversation to look for something they had shied away from: what had
+somebody said about women born to be twenty and what they became?
+Somebody had lost themselves, been lost to one, vanished.... He knew
+that all women were born to be twenty—twenty-two, twenty-five possibly:
+the thing seemed obvious, looking at Joan. Something, however, had
+become of a Miss Maclean he had met at Darjeeling and of a subsequent
+lovely Mrs. Duperrier of whom he had asked no more than all she
+triumphantly promised, to be twenty at any age, he would not have
+counted the years. Perhaps in spite of herself, she had eluded him. Lost
+her way? She was lying alone now up there, up in her room, waiting
+angrily for the sun to go down and the light to go quite out and the
+darkness to stifle her, lying with the window open expectantly on to the
+void of sky, waiting to shiver, tossing to and fro in her poor mind
+while her body lay rigid, silent though she was so pent up, storing up
+her cries for him: “Oh, _here_ you are, Alec.... No, I didn’t really
+expect you to come in. Why should you have come in? I daresay you were
+happy down there....”
+
+Mrs. Kerr and a party of friends who must have been having tea together
+further down the garden passed by and went out talking and laughing and
+Ronald strayed after them, looking slightly disoriented. His Panama was
+folded under his arm, he glanced sidelong at each of the tables under
+his lashes, prepared to swerve wide of them if anyone hailed him or put
+out a hand. Colonel Duperrier, though he did not take to the youth, was
+vaguely sorry for him; he was not, like Master Ammering, either plump,
+complacent, or noisy, and his idleness might well be a phase and had
+(like Colonel Duperrier’s own) the grace of dejection. He made,
+therefore, an encouraging sound in his throat and pulled back a chair
+from the table invitingly, while Eileen, who seemed to find Ronald’s
+manner of going by them provocative, shouted “Hi, Ronald!” so sharply
+that everyone jumped.
+
+Having effected their capture they all three smiled at Ronald with the
+anxious benevolence, the slightly embarrassed solicitude which it seemed
+a gift of his own to inspire in all circles, and which had made, for
+some reason, his company out here particularly sought after. He was
+asked everywhere, to bridge, to dinner at other hotels, to the
+Lee-Mittisons’ coffee parties, and went, under some delicate indirect
+maternal compulsion, with always the same air of being strung up for
+martyrdom to the occasion as the young Sebastian of painters is strung
+to a tree. He did not look at present a happy boy as, leaning forward,
+slack wrists crossed on a knee, he gazed with an unreserved
+attentiveness which they found still further embarrassing from one
+Lawrence’s face to the other.
+
+“It is neither of you, I think, that I am to congratulate on an
+engagement to Mr. Ammering?”
+
+“No, thank Heaven!” said Eileen emphatically.
+
+“Oh?” said Ronald, surprised, “but _wouldn’t_ you like to marry him? I
+thought he seemed so popular out here.”
+
+“He is an exceedingly lucky young man,” pronounced Colonel Duperrier.
+
+“Of course,” agreed Ronald politely. “I have just congratulated Miss
+Warren too,” he added, “and Mr. Milton, whom I met out walking together.
+They both looked very much surprised and rather offended. Surely I
+haven’t done the wrong thing, have I—they _are_ engaged?”
+
+“Everyone knows,” said Eileen, “and I don’t suppose Sydney likes that:
+it isn’t select. But _you_ ought to know something about it, anyway; she
+will have told your mother.”
+
+“I don’t think she has,” said Ronald vaguely. “I’m afraid not. I suppose
+my mother’s not the proper sort of matron. She would hardly, I suppose,
+provide the bosom that young women on these occasions are supposed to
+require. I’m afraid she may perhaps feel, like I do, that one’s friends,
+however various and delightful they may be at other times, are least
+interesting—while of course deserving all respect—at these moments when
+they approximate most closely to the normal. What people call life’s
+larger experiences,” said Ronald, “are so very narrowing.”
+
+“What a vocabulary you’ve got, Kerr!” Colonel Duperrier said,
+respectfully offering his cigarette case. “I’ve never heard such a flow
+of language—Write?”
+
+“I try not to,” said Ronald, looking ruefully at a cigarette as though
+he wished he had not taken it, and inclining with a sigh to Colonel
+Duperrier’s lighted match. It was another of these idyllic evenings,
+agonizingly meaningless; the evening air brought out the scent of the
+lemons. The Lawrences, shrugging up their woollen wraps round their
+shoulders slid forward in their chairs luxuriously and sank down into
+themselves like cats into their fur. Their blue smoke drifted away
+through the clearness. Joan said thoughtfully: “I don’t suppose it
+matters—talking, I mean—so long as you know exactly what you mean
+yourself. I don’t because I never do.”
+
+“You may think all the more,” said Colonel Duperrier, knocking the ash
+of his cigarette off, not quite looking at her.
+
+“Oh yes, I do think a good deal,” said Joan, swinging one foot and
+watching it, very mysterious.
+
+“Do you really?” said Ronald with interest, coming wide awake. “What do
+you think about?”
+
+“Well, really ...” interposed Eileen, after a hard stare—“Well, really,
+Ronald, you _are_ cool!”
+
+To Colonel Duperrier’s amusement, Ronald reddened and stuttered. Ronald
+was thinner-skinned than one thought, he hated offending people and
+making them angry. But he couldn’t imagine, obviously, what he had done.
+“I, I’m most awfully sorry. But why...?”
+
+“Well, I _mean_,” said Eileen, “really, if a person’s own thoughts
+aren’t their own ... I mean, if a person’s going to be expected to say
+what they feel about everything——”
+
+“I didn’t say ‘feel,’ I said ‘think.’”
+
+“Well, it’s the same thing,” said Eileen. They stared at one another.
+
+“Oh,” said Ronald. “I’m very sorry. You see, what _I_ think is so
+public, if anyone’s interested.”
+
+“Well, it would be—you’re only a boy.”
+
+“Oh, look here, Eileen; don’t bullyrag Ronald——”
+
+“It’s all right, thank you,” said Ronald, still rather pink. “I am very
+much interested in your sister’s point of view.”
+
+“I haven’t got a point of view,” said Eileen indignantly. “I’m simply
+talking plain sense. Look here: if you look at a bun you don’t just
+think about it’s being a bun, do you: you wonder what you feel about it
+and whether it would be nice to eat, and whether it is somebody else’s
+bun and there would be a row if you did. And with a person, or anything
+else it’s the same thing.”
+
+“Ah well,” said Ronald, “if that’s what you call thinking I daresay it
+may be private, very private indeed. You see, I don’t know anybody else
+who thinks like that: I had no idea——”
+
+“I don’t suppose many people would take the trouble to explain to you
+how they do think. They’d just let you run on with your own ideas and
+nod and smile and say ‘How lovely!’ and think about something else all
+the time.”
+
+Joan, while the privacy of her thoughts was being battled for, had
+remained, since her one intervention, abstracted; her gold hair spread
+out corolla-wise over the mounting folds of her scarf. “Feel my wrist,
+it’s like ice,” she said suddenly. “It must be awfully cold?”
+
+“My dear child!”
+
+“Oh! I don’t suppose it is cold really,” Joan felt as though of her own
+accord she had dropped a crystal and smashed it. “_Don’t_ let’s go,” she
+begged with pathetic eyes of Colonel Duperrier. “I don’t know why I said
+that at all—it was only my wrist.”
+
+“_I_ don’t want to, I’m sure.” He looked around the garden regretfully
+as though they were not to come here again; it seemed a better garden
+than he had realized, more friendly. “But we can’t have you frozen,” he
+said and looked at Joan helplessly, because it would be ultimately
+beyond his province whether she were frozen or not.
+
+“Idiot!” cried her sister, “where are your gloves?”
+
+“These evenings,” explained Ronald, “come down like the knife of a
+guillotine. I must be getting on anyway, after my mother.” He rose and
+looked down at them thoughtfully: a queer (he seemed to think) and never
+entirely satisfactory group. “Are you coming my way?” he asked Eileen.
+Her mind leapt forward immediately to telling Veronica that Ronald—“Yes,
+my dear, I swear he did actually—” had asked her to come for a walk.
+“One to me,” she reckoned, “there’s nothing like being crisp with these
+slithery, day-after-to-morrow people who only half see you. He’d eat out
+of my hand, I’ll swear he would. I shall keep him out for an hour, take
+him round by the town.” Smiling she said to the others: “Do you mind, if
+Ronald and I move along?” Her only doubt, as coming out of the gate she
+turned the head of Ronald resolutely townwards, was whether she could
+postpone for so long the ecstasy of telling Veronica, who would be now,
+she knew, curled up in her bed by the window reading a magazine and
+eating peppermints and regretting more and more as the interval of
+solitude prolonged itself that the Affaire Victor should ever have
+occurred.
+
+The other two were left in a solitude which, quite unprecedented, they
+felt to be exigent and a little singular. “I expect,” Joan said with a
+little stiff movement that did not do much for her, “that we had better
+be getting along too.”
+
+“I expect we had,” said Colonel Duperrier. It was half past five, he
+discovered; up there she would be half insane with speculation. By this
+hour he had till to-day, never failed to present himself. He looked
+about him at the other tables, distant between the trees, where couples
+in rather forced and conscious intimacy still lingered, the evening
+before them, gazing a shade owlishly less at than around each other,
+oppressed by their leisure. Odd, thought Colonel Duperrier; queer,
+following his look, thought Joan. She propped her long chin on her
+chilly hand and sighed a melancholy, unresentful sigh. “Cheer up,” her
+friend said solemnly.
+
+“I haven’t got such a cheerful disposition as you have.”
+
+“I suppose I have got rather a cheerful disposition,” said Colonel
+Duperrier, glancing reluctantly at himself and looking away again.
+
+“Of course,” she said in her matter-of-fact little voice, “you are
+wonderful.” She leant back to grope behind her chair for her racquet and
+repeated “Wonderful!” in a tone of indignation, perhaps because the
+racquet wasn’t there. “I expect,” she began again, “we ought to be——”
+
+“I know. I really think we ought to be coming in. If you catch cold, you
+know, I should never forgive myself.”
+
+“I promise I won’t catch cold,” poor Joan said faithfully, and getting
+up looked round her distractedly for the racquet propped against the
+side of her chair.
+
+“Thank you very much,” she said, “for our nice tea.”
+
+“It has been a pleasure to me,” said Colonel Duperrier.
+
+
+
+
+                                   XX
+
+
+“Dear Mr. Milton,” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr, “is this true? Because if so,
+it’s splendid!”
+
+He remained standing; she, propped reposefully among cushions, sat
+looking up at him. “Yes, you are charming,” he doubtfully thought, “you
+injurious woman.” He tried to look straight, as though dropping a
+plummet, into those profound brimming eyes, but the light from the
+ceiling invaded them, raw, hard-edged light as though cut out of
+tin-foil that, touching them, softened, swam down through them, melted;
+so that he could read nothing, looking however deep. He had to surrender
+to her effect of mild brilliancy, of being serious, eager, friendly.
+“Yes, it’s true,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”
+
+After dinner, since Ronald’s arrival, she no longer went straight to her
+room but would sit with him on a sofa backed by a palm at the quieter
+end of the lounge. Here they looked, thought James Milton, approaching,
+like a fancy of Omar Khayyam’s, with a small tray of coffee between
+them, a stack of serious periodicals (presumably Ronald’s) and a basket
+of crystallized fruit which Ronald would advance to their guests with a
+deprecating liberality as though he did not really care for this sort of
+thing himself. Their guest one did definitely constitute oneself, Milton
+felt, by coming over to them; her graceful reception of one confirmed
+this, also the punctilious uprising of Ronald, who would continue to
+tower, prolonged by his shirt-front, indefinitely tall; crumpling
+gradually till asked to sit down again. Milton was not uninvited, he had
+insinuated himself down the lounge between eager conversationalists and
+touching chairbacks in response to a direct glance, a concentration upon
+himself of her general smile round as she looked at him.
+
+Ronald pulled a chair forward at right-angles; Milton sat down with
+them.
+
+“Then of course,” Mrs. Kerr said, summing him up, “you are happy.”
+
+One is not, at such moments, expected to show oneself adequate; his
+smile and his gesture acknowledged becoming inadequacy. She nodded her
+womanly comprehension. “Quite,” said she.
+
+“Excellent,” said Ronald with an air of seniority to both of them. He
+recrossed his legs and bit into a crystallized tangerine.
+
+“I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr thoughtfully, “I do perhaps understand a
+little of what this means to her.”
+
+“She told you, of course.” Milton had presence of mind enough to make a
+startled gesture into a statement.
+
+She nodded. “A little,” she said. “You know—well, of _course_ you
+know—she is a very quiet person. She didn’t say much, but she shone. She
+has the strangest possibilities of shining.” Mrs. Kerr seemed to have,
+as she spoke, a glimpse of Sydney from which he was excluded. “Of
+course,” she added in the perfunctory quiet voice in which perfect taste
+demands the making of certain statements, “_she_ is very happy ... I
+have wanted so much for her and expected, really, so little that seeing
+her so, so lit-up, so certain, has meant a great deal to me. You’ve
+done—do you really understand?—a great deal.”
+
+“Thank you,” Milton said helplessly.
+
+“There is no reason to thank _me_,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking at him very
+straight with her wide-opened eyes. “What is there to thank me for?”
+
+Milton, abashed by this parade of innocence, looked at Ronald, wishing
+that he were not there. Mrs. Kerr, however, seemed determined to keep
+him.
+
+“Now, Ronald,” she said with amusement, laying a hand on her son’s knee,
+looking down at it thoughtfully and drawing it away again, “feels sorry
+for people who are going to be married. He cannot believe (isn’t it so?)
+in ‘any satisfactory _modus vivendi_ between two people that is based on
+an attraction’!”
+
+“I remain perfectly open-minded,” said Ronald, biting the stalk off a
+pear.
+
+“About love itself,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking respectfully at her son,
+“he is profoundly sceptical. There is a part of life, Mr. Milton, that I
+should be very glad if you could explain to my poor Ronald.”
+
+“It’s not a part of life,” said Ronald, “it may be a streak in it.
+People talk as though it were a transverse section.”
+
+“You see?” said his mother. “But Sydney used to be a sceptic too, you
+know. I should rather like Ronald to talk to her now.”
+
+“I don’t think Sydney would like that at all,” said Milton, and was made
+at once to feel he had transgressed some delicate code by this hint of
+the proprietary.
+
+“I had an impression,” said Mrs. Kerr diffidently, “that Sydney always
+liked talking about anything she was perfectly sure of.”
+
+“In spite of being rather a quiet person?”
+
+“Quite compatibly with being rather a quiet person,” said Mrs. Kerr,
+illuminating, showing-up his petty irritation with her lovely smile. “I
+didn’t, you know, propose that poor Sydney who has so very lately, as
+one might say, graduated, should deliver to Ronald a kind of
+extension-lecture. I just vaguely conceived that she might make him feel
+what a silly, immature little gander he still is.”
+
+“I wish she would,” said Ronald, “it would be so _cinquecento_; a
+disquisition on Amor by an inspired young woman.” He looked carefully at
+Milton trying, evidently, to consider him in the rôle of an inspiration.
+
+“You have picked up ‘_cinquecento_’ from Miss Fitzgerald. It becomes a
+rather silly expression, Ronald dear, when it’s used so often and so
+indiscriminately. But ‘an inspired young woman,’” she decided turning to
+Milton, “is good. Don’t you find your inspired young woman rather
+lovely?”
+
+“Rather lovely!” echoed Milton, as though learning a lesson.
+
+“Sydney in love ...” mused Mrs. Kerr, and as though stepping back from
+the brink of some profound experience not her own, she said, “I envy
+you!”
+
+Milton encountered Ronald’s clear, rather curious eye; they stared at
+one another narrowly. “One is fortunate,” Milton said and a stabbing
+sense of this irony made him shut his eyes sharply for a moment, as
+though the light were too much. When he looked up again Mrs. Kerr’s son
+was still searching him, and put forward in explanation of this: “Do
+excuse me, please, for staring so awfully but I’ve never heard anyone
+point-blank profess themselves happy before.” It was on the tip of the
+clergyman’s tongue to protest that he hadn’t; however, he merely said
+blandly: “Oh, indeed? If you care to, do certainly look!”
+
+“You ought,” Ronald said, “to feel very responsible.”
+
+“—Ronald _darling_, you’re not Mr. Milton’s father.”
+
+“But I didn’t propose,” said her son, flushing hotly, “to apply the
+remark to Miss Warren. I merely meant he must feel very responsible for
+_himself_. A state of mind——”
+
+“Exactly,” said Mrs. Kerr briskly and waved him aside. She appeared to
+be rather oppressed by her Ronald; the boy became pompous. She looked at
+his overcast face in perplexity, puzzling herself again, it appeared,
+over some ancient error. Far back in the faraway history of
+Ronald—possibly in the espousal of Ronald’s father—there had been a
+mistake. She looked down the lounge. “Look, Ronald,” she cried with a
+glad inspiration, “there is one of your Lawrences, one of your curious
+girls. She is standing and looking too languishing down by the door. She
+has seen you, and, worse, she has seen you have something to eat. It
+would be nice to go over and talk to her, if you don’t mind. I don’t
+like to _look_ selfish, you know.”
+
+She watched her son threading his way down the lounge, however, with
+such wistfulness, such an air of bereavement, and returned her attention
+to Milton with so courageous a smile, and with eyes for an instant so
+vacant that he could not but believe that she had made a real sacrifice
+in sending Ronald away. He reproached himself for a suspicion of being
+closed in on; and of their oasis of silence, light and solitude having
+become for him a rather remote and dangerous island. Her personality had
+a curious way of negativing her surroundings, so that unless one made
+constant resort to one’s senses the background faded and one conjured up
+in one’s half-consciousness another that better expressed her, that was
+half an exhalation from herself. The crude and vivid glitter of the
+lounge, the hard light striking with an impact almost audible on glazed
+stuffs, noisy colours, reddened skins, the urgent hum of talk, all these
+relaxed their grip on Milton’s consciousness, subsided. A feeling was
+produced in him of tempered lamp-light and clear gloom and of a window
+open on profoundly dark and rather restless trees, as Mrs. Kerr said
+thoughtfully: “Religion, I suppose, is an immense outlet for gratitude.”
+
+“One would be sorry to make use of one’s religion as an outlet for
+anything.”
+
+She retracted. “The psychologists have led one so astray.”
+
+“The fallacy’s older than they are.”
+
+“I suppose so,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. She went on with an effort, going
+against, obviously, all the fine instincts she had for reserve. “You
+have felt, I daresay, that force of ... of religion in Sydney. I’ve had
+to draw back there, because I don’t, as you see, understand. One never
+would hold her back, lacking that.”
+
+“I don’t see her ever as a person to be absolutely held.”
+
+She was stirred by amazement, caught a breath as though she must have
+misheard him and lifted her eyebrows. “Not held? You forget,” she said,
+“I’ve been her friend.” She reflected: “Does new power bring with it,
+perhaps, its own disabilities? You are, aren’t you, quite newly her
+lover? You mayn’t _see_ yet, may not admit intellectually, but you must
+surely _feel_ that....”
+
+“You don’t think I quite understand what I’ve got?”
+
+“I don’t think you can trust yourself yet to look down very deep. But
+you ought—she is yours; absolutely. We have all of us fallen away.”
+There was not a note in her voice of anything but triumph: she smiled at
+him like a priestess.
+
+“You feel I need to be told this?” he said and felt his own smile twist
+his face awkwardly.
+
+“There is need,” she said with a penetrating, long look. “You do know.”
+He felt again, through that window behind her, that dark garden
+distressed by the wind, around her those undisturbed shadows, that
+never-ebbing, mild light. “Suppose,” he began uneasily, “suppose I were
+less fortunate. Suppose—you see I am secure enough to indulge myself in
+these curiosities—she had simply caught at my hand, were gripping it
+desperately, because she was frightened, or had been misdirected, say,
+and lost her way—I would be right, knowing that, to keep hold of her,
+for her protection?”
+
+“—A protection!” interposed Mrs. Kerr—“you think that with most innocent
+cynicism she would be capable of accepting? But go on, please, I won’t
+interrupt you.”
+
+“That was all.” He laughed. “Vague curiosity. Should I be right?”
+
+“If you cared to be just a convenience,” said Mrs. Kerr thoughtfully,
+“it wouldn’t be _wrong_. But can you believe she’d ... make use of you?
+Would it be, in the most ordinary woman, pretty or admirable? Could you
+reconcile that with the only Sydney possible for either of us? For our
+two Sydneys, I’m sure, are the same.”
+
+“But there’s panic....”
+
+“Panic doesn’t last more than its moment. Of course, there’s
+opportunism....” She caught Milton looking at her haggardly. “You didn’t
+think,” she said gently, “that I thought you meant _that_?”
+
+He gave, to express scorn, a rather ghastly little monosyllabic laugh.
+
+“It does sound silly,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “It is silly, I think, to let
+oneself play, just because of one’s sense of absolute security with even
+the most far-fetched idea of her doing anything so careful and mean. An
+idea,” she said, shivering slightly, “has a curious power; it preys on
+one. Oh, you must promise me that you won’t,” she cried. “It frightens
+me—you could send yourself mad!”
+
+“It’s nice of you to care,” said Milton.
+
+“Do you think I don’t value _my_ Sydney?” she exclaimed and stared
+darkly at something, then brushed it away with her hand and smiled with
+a return of tranquillity. “One’s idea of a person,” she told him,
+“refuses to take certain possibilities, like a material refusing to take
+certain dyes. Don’t you feel so? For instance: for anyone else, any
+woman, as angry and hurt in her pride, and as disappointed as I’m afraid
+Sydney’s been with me lately, to have taken you up, with the strong
+position you’ve given her, would have been the inevitable, rather sordid
+perhaps but effective complete little gesture. One would have looked for
+it, wouldn’t one, and—taking the thing at its own valuation—rather
+applauded. One can’t help applauding the score-off, the adequate pat
+little retaliation, all the more perhaps because oneself one could never
+achieve it. And we both of us know,” said Mrs. Kerr radiantly, “that for
+her it would never be possible either. And even supposing we didn’t,
+that we weren’t so exclusive on her behalf, hasn’t she given us proof?”
+
+“—If it were needed,” said Milton, and began chafing his hands together
+as though they were cold. He was silent a moment staring down at the
+edge of her skirts, at the ground. He dragged himself back to consider
+something. “What did you, by the way, mean by a proof?”
+
+“But her loving you,” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr wide-eyed, “her loving you
+absolutely! Mr. Milton, do try and make her less hurt with me. Surely
+you can, can’t you? Make her happy enough to come back.” Mrs. Kerr, with
+her eyes and a gesture, gave herself away to him in perfect humility. “I
+do miss the child so!”
+
+“But how’m I to know she’s still hurt?” the lover said dully, looking at
+her in remote admiration in which he had a quick sense of being
+identified with Sydney.
+
+“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Kerr, recollecting Sydney’s change of state, “she’s
+not. But I was impatient and clumsy; I think she was hurt in her pride.”
+
+“I cannot believe, Mrs. Kerr,” said Milton in a tone of such infinite
+irony that his voice sounded gentler than ever, “I can’t really believe
+that you’ve ever been clumsy. I should say that your patience was
+infinite. But she has this queer appetite for pain: it brings with it
+its own ingenuity against which one can’t be defended at all points.”
+
+With a sigh she allowed herself to accept this as possible. “Thank you,
+you’re generous,” she said and examined him. “_You_, if you like, would
+have infinite patience. You two can’t, I think, fail to be happy
+together. I’m so happy about you—” she looked round with relief as
+though rising again to the surface and by taking everything in with such
+eagerness re-admitted the lounge to his consciousness—“and, as
+middle-aged women do feel, quite important; as though I were standing
+like your good Moses at some kind of vantage point and seeing ahead of
+both of you plainer than you can. It would be equally nice, I believe,”
+she concluded, swimming back to the plane she had started from, kind
+superficiality, “to be married to either of you.”
+
+He was dismissed; she appeared to have done with him. The laughter and
+voices packed round them between the four looking-glassed walls seemed
+to rise to a climax, a positive shout. The lounge seemed for a moment to
+mean something—he glanced for a hint of the revelation at some of the
+faces but whatever it was had escaped him; the faces were shut-up and
+blank.
+
+“If you will,” said Mrs. Kerr, “can you look out for Ronald? I don’t
+want him disturbed if he’s happy—just tell him I’m going to bed. It’s
+been so nice of you to talk to me about this, Mr. Milton. I’ve always
+felt that we knew each other and yet, do you realize, we’ve not spoken
+for more than a moment before. If I’ve kept you from Sydney, forgive me.
+You must go now and find her. Good-night.”
+
+When she had gone he sat down on the rather hard sofa across which the
+cushions had, as she got up, tumbled down in disorder. He felt the light
+slanting down on him stupefyingly from the mirrors and ceiling a
+protection from feeling, a barrier, like an orchestra above which one
+could not, even if one had wanted to, make oneself heard.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XXI
+
+
+For two days the sun had been cut away by an opaque, pale-grey
+absolutely cloudless sky: this made the shapes of hills and houses more
+important; an ascent of the heights became arduous in the cool, close
+air and one was loath to go far up any one of the valleys because one
+felt it shutting on one like a book. The disappearance of sunlight from
+the flowers deadened the colours of them; from being like flames,
+spontaneous, they became tawdry and adventitious; bougainvillæas traced
+a heavy pattern on the walls, geraniums were the flat stale pink of old
+confectionery, and the mimosa blotched the faces of the hills as
+monotone and pale as mustard. The distances were pellucid, one could see
+for miles every detail of the coast, every ripple of the light sea, and
+these became important and a little ominous; one felt weighed down by
+them and half uneasy. Ronald, going alone up a river-bed in one of the
+valleys, found himself hurrying.
+
+The river had once been expansive and impetuous, it had carried some of
+the hills along with it and flowed widely; at some points it had taken
+up the whole floor of the valley, leaping past the foot of the rocks
+hilariously or, dividing, made a long string of lemon-shaped islands.
+Now its wide bed lay parched, a petrified torrent up which Ronald,
+taking some pleasure in the performance, walked painfully with a sharp,
+continuous, loudly-echoed clattering together of stones. The river was
+young no longer, it had made an end of its variations and detours and
+had worn away for itself a very deep channel down which it flowed
+swiftly, with a sinister effect of purpose; steel-smooth, impenetrable
+to the eye of Ronald, to whom it was no longer a companion. They should
+have known one another centuries before.
+
+The margins of land on either side, before the walls of the valley went
+up, were under cultivation; they were divided cross-ways and when Ronald
+scrambled up out of the river-bed to sit down on a sagging lip of turf
+and nurse a barked ankle or extract a stone from his shoe it is more
+than probable that he was trespassing. In such a country however one is
+bound to trespass everywhere; much is forgiven if one be sufficiently
+beautiful, have an innocent expression and do not seem to understand
+Italian shouted from above. Ronald’s expression, ingenuous and nervous
+as a foal’s, would have disarmed the angriest proprietor, but for this
+there was no occasion; the valley seemed to be quite empty. Since he had
+left behind the three young women, the goats, the staring men, there had
+been nobody. Perhaps, he thought, the valley was to-day just _too_
+narrow, too clothed in the echo of water, too deep beneath the tension
+of the sky from hill to hill, and they had all turned back
+instinctively. He wondered at himself for going on.
+
+Three young women leaning over the parental gate had admired Ronald
+loudly and in every detail. They had spoken so very distinctly that he
+could only suppose they meant him to understand; he had slowed down in
+an effort not to seem to be trying to escape them; his ears changed
+colour, they remarked on this—it had been quite appalling. Their eyes
+had licked him up and down like the eyes of the American lady at
+Wurtemberg who had compared him to a Donatello, and he could not revenge
+himself on _them_ by making out a kind of mental chart of their
+repressions because one couldn’t well suppose that girls who behaved in
+this way had any repressions. Which of course, as Ronald told himself
+without enthusiasm, was excellent. They gave him, quite disinterestedly,
+all sorts of encouragement and good advice.
+
+The man who stared also had shouted a word of encouragement, the same
+mystifying reference to some “bellissima.” Then the solitude had come
+slowly to grips with him: there was nothing but the deserted bed of the
+river, the vague, disorderly gardens—like some half-memory and, now and
+then, a bird flying slowly across the sky. Ronald had nothing but a
+little lonely gleam of intellectual pride to sustain him; he felt that
+it must be good for him to be here but he was very much depressed. He
+felt trapped; if he turned to run back down the valley there would be
+nothing but valley to run to. “_O Solitude_,” he exclaimed in a thin
+voice, “_ton sein vigoureux et morne déjà j’ai pu l’adorer_....” He
+could not remember the rest of the paragraph, and besides, had not
+Barrès lapsed from this to all the excesses of nationalism? What
+unaccountable lapses, thought Ronald, precede maturity, which they are
+even believed to constitute! He suddenly gave up clattering among the
+stones, did not speak any more and hugging the side of the valley away
+from the river walked on the turf quietly, because it appeared to him
+that one could best enforce oneself on this noisy solitude not by more
+noise but by silence. So quite quietly he rounded the turn of the valley
+and came in sight of the rock where Sydney was sitting, looking up the
+valley away from him. After gazing for some moments at her apparent
+unconsciousness, he said slowly “Oh ... you?”
+
+“Oh, _you?_” she exclaimed, mystified but not startled.
+
+“I hope I didn’t alarm you!”
+
+“No, I heard you coming but I didn’t turn round because I thought I knew
+who it was. Were you expecting to find anybody in particular?”
+
+“Well no, not really anybody. They all told me to hurry up because there
+was a _bellissima Inglese_, but I imagined that, you know, was just a
+general allusion to ‘that not impossible She’ and thought nothing more
+of it.”
+
+“They?”
+
+“Some little girls at a gate and a man doing nothing particular.”
+
+“Whenever anybody just says ‘they,’” said Sydney who showed signs of
+being pleased to see him, “one thinks of Lear, doesn’t one, and a
+perspective of long noses. ‘They’ watched me, too, coming up here, but
+they didn’t say anything. I am glad to know they were impressed.”
+
+“They are impressionable,” said Ronald. “If it is Mr. Milton you’re
+expecting, he won’t like those girls a bit. They are a positive barrage.
+Their conversation was very free.”
+
+“I expect they liked you,” said Sydney, glancing at him with indifferent
+admiration. “Also, of course, they wouldn’t be able to imagine why you
+should want to walk up a valley alone unless there were a woman at the
+end of it. Unless, of course, you had carried a long gun and wore tight
+green velvet knickerbockers and showed every sign of going out to shoot
+linnets.”
+
+“I’m afraid,” said Ronald, “that’s very English of you.”
+
+“I’m afraid I don’t like these people at all. I cannot see why they
+should ever have been born, or why, at least, they should need to go on
+being born over and over again so frequently.”
+
+“I daresay,” said Ronald, “they enrich the soil.”
+
+“I daresay,” said Sydney. She was sitting on a rock that jutted up
+sharply out of the river-bed; it would once have been a perilous,
+amusing place to sit. At present it complicated his position rather; if
+he stayed where he was they would have to talk in high-pitched voices to
+be heard above the noise of the water that hurried behind her, whereas
+if he came across the stones and sat beside her he would be made to feel
+himself rather tiresomely confidential and forthcoming. The rock however
+was large enough for both of them and she settled the question by saying
+matter-of-factly: “Here, come and sit down,” and twisting round so that
+her legs, which had been stretched out in front of her, could leave more
+room for him by dangling over the edge. “What a lot of energy is
+wasted,” she observed, “in replacing one lot of people by another
+exactly the same.”
+
+She remarked this distantly, as though the indirectness of the stream of
+things had been brought to her notice passingly but did not concern her.
+Her attitude seemed to Ronald deplorable; leaning back on his elbow he
+subjected her profile, covertly, to a perplexed and grieved scrutiny.
+“And does this worry you at all?” he asked in the hope that while
+preserving an equal detachment, he might make her at least aware of her
+strange anæsthesia. An intelligent person, Ronald thought, should never
+be entirely unperturbed. She turned to look at him with the dark
+attentiveness of wandering thoughts.
+
+“_Worry?_” she said slowly and tried to recall herself. “Why should I
+worry? I can’t do anything about it all, can I?”
+
+“My mother, you know, describes you as independent and vigorous.”
+
+“I had no idea,” said Sydney thoughtfully, and longed to know exactly
+how his mother _had_ described her. Ronald might have been a key to a
+great deal; instead, he had his own obscure preoccupations. Except for
+his eyes and forehead and a few of her gestures and mannerisms which
+cropped up now and then in his conversation, out of tone with the rest
+of him, he in no way resembled his mother. Mrs. Kerr, at least, had not
+cared to replace herself. What qualities he had of hers had been given
+over to him unreservedly; they did not seem in any way to be shared or
+to bring the two into closer community. He, like the rest, revolved
+round his mother enquiringly, with a perhaps more intimate but with the
+same exterior curiosity. He was at most two or three steps higher up the
+base of the monument: from here he said wisely to Sydney: “My mother,
+you know, is intelligent. She understands, or she wouldn’t admire.”
+
+“I suppose she wouldn’t,” said Sydney and let the thing drop. But though
+Mrs. Kerr’s son did not interest her she felt drawn towards Ronald as
+though he were a part of her youth and she asked, looking back for a
+landmark to measure how far she had travelled, “And _you_ really do
+mean, I suppose, to make rather a difference?”
+
+“Well, one can’t help hoping one may,” said Ronald smiling at himself,
+very elderly and indulgent. “Usen’t you, too?”
+
+“_Usen’t?_” said Sydney, aggrieved at being so taken up.
+
+“Oh, I suppose you still may; but you can’t overlook Mr. Milton.” Saying
+this, he tried vainly to reconcile the importance and solitariness in
+which she had just now been discovered with his idea of her as the
+engaged girl. She sat looking down, with a faint droop (he thought he
+detected), a hint of contrition, an acquiescence to being set aside of
+which she seemed to be making a rather too sardonic and cool exhibition.
+She felt this and said deferentially:
+
+“Of course _you’ve_ got no patience with this sort of thing?”
+
+“I may be young,” said Ronald, “but I’m never so grossly ingenuous as
+downright to commit myself.” He began kicking the rock with his heel;
+and with pursed mouth and a gleam of amusement she was not intended to
+share, withheld his opinion.
+
+“Why,” she asked in surprise, “who said you were young?”
+
+“Oh, I understand you did. But of course,” he said lightly, anxious that
+they should neither of them be embarrassed, “it seems an impression
+one’s bound to create. Would _you_ ever have minded—why should one?” He
+looked serenely past her down the valley—a little, she thought, too
+serenely. Evidently he did mind. If he had not been likely to mind why
+should his mother have told him? “Of course,” he vouchsafed, “it is in a
+general way a mistake to involve oneself anywhere.”
+
+Sydney felt wiser, but it is poor satisfaction to be wise with the
+masses. She asked: “Do you never mean to involve yourself?” Perhaps he
+never would, perhaps it was not possible to—a chilly suspicion.
+
+“Oh I just mean to live in a rather simplified way and not to leave off
+being reasonable. Now it’s a mistake, I’m quite sure, to deny an
+attraction. One should cultivate it and be amused at oneself. Then one
+would be civilized.”
+
+“And what about other people?” said Sydney, “what about your mother, for
+instance?”
+
+“My mother? She is very civilized.” Puckering their lids up in the
+sunless glare his eyes gazed past her, pale with a reflection of the
+sky.
+
+“I know, that is her great advantage. But don’t you think wherever she
+was she’d be civilized _alone_? Do you think she would promote your kind
+of civilization?”
+
+“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ronald. “She is not an _earnest_
+woman. I can’t imagine her ‘promoting’ anything.”
+
+“She wouldn’t promote _that_, she wouldn’t want to. She isn’t at all
+modern like you and me, you see. It isn’t necessary for her.”
+
+Ronald remembered what his mother had said about “white tiles.” He felt
+annoyed with Sydney and rounded on her: “I say, you don’t dislike my
+mother, do you?”
+
+“No, you know I don’t.”
+
+“I wondered—people do, you know. Does Mr. Milton?”
+
+“Why ever should he? I, I’ve never asked him.”
+
+“He looks at her so—carefully.” Quite without malice Ronald imitated
+Milton’s expression. “Of course, I think he seems a most discriminating
+man,” he concluded politely. He had been gathering together, while he
+spoke, small pebbles and fragments which had accumulated on the top of
+the rock, reaching out for them negligently in all directions and
+heaping them up beside him. Now suddenly he sat bolt upright and began
+to hurl them one after another down the valley with a great effect of
+muscularity and science. The pebbles skipped, the fragments of rock
+rebounded on the boulders of the river-bed with little sharp distinct
+sounds, pin-pricks through the silence. The hills seemed to peer
+forward. This little tempest of exertion on Ronald’s part, into which he
+seemed to have been surprised in spite of himself dishevelled the
+stillness of the valley which unstressed by light or shadows and
+unstirred by wind had hung gravely round them like a curtain.
+
+“Oh do look out!” cried Sydney angrily. “You may hit James; he may be
+coming up.”
+
+“I suppose he may,” admitted Ronald but could not keep himself from
+sending off his last three stones. “Then why doesn’t he come?” he said
+relapsing on to his elbow again. “What is the matter?”
+
+“I can’t think. I cut out lunch and came up here this morning because I
+had a headache, and I left word that I’d be here if he cared to come up
+afterwards. I said the third valley to the right, behind the convent. He
+may have miscounted. Or he may not want to come.”
+
+“But he must want to. After all it would be only reasonable.”
+
+“You mean, consistently _un_reasonable?”
+
+“No, if I were in love at all I should expect to be with you all day!”
+said Ronald masterfully.
+
+“Ah, to be in love _at all’s_ the initial mistake!”
+
+“More really a misapprehension.”
+
+While Ronald talked she often had a giddy sense of watching all she had
+ever said being wound off from a spool again, backwards. Now and then
+came a truth that she had let slip away; she received this last one back
+again ice-cold. It went too deep and she wasn’t grateful to Ronald.
+
+“Well, don’t you, my dear Ronald, ever misapprehend?”
+
+“And don’t you be maternal!”
+
+Catching some idea of a sound or a voice from one another they began to
+listen, as though the very mention of Milton’s name must have cast out a
+line to his consciousness and be drawing him up the valley towards them.
+For a moment or two they felt he was to appear immediately. Sydney leant
+forward expectantly but nobody came into sight at the turn of the
+valley. She felt cold and bitterly reproached herself for not having
+turned to smile sooner when she had been so sure she heard him coming
+before, when it had only been Ronald. She did not look at her watch but
+knew that she had reached that psychological moment, that turning-point
+of any long wait when the likelihood of a friend’s arrival instead of
+increasing with the advance of time begins to diminish. She feared that
+through some intervention of a too far-seeing Providence on Milton’s
+behalf she might never see him again. She prayed that this might not be
+so: she felt sure that she loved him. Ronald, half aware of all this,
+felt a long way away from her and began to wonder whether after all from
+the first he had not intruded.
+
+He said (to observe the effect), “I’ll be going, I think. I may meet
+him—I’ll hurry him on. Anyhow he wouldn’t want to find me here.”
+
+The effect was a panic. “No, don’t, please don’t go,” she exclaimed. “I
+can’t bear this valley alone: it’s so empty.”
+
+“You might have noticed that before,” he observed warming in spite of
+himself at this display of femininity. “Nervy?”
+
+“Yes, nervy,” she agreed with a little boy’s grin.
+
+He sat down beside her again with mixed feelings of constraint and
+gratification, and began—while their silence relaxed again, from an
+alert, constricting consciousness of each other’s proximity into a
+benign and restful indifference—to kick with swinging heels the side of
+the rock.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XXII
+
+
+Unwilling to go further, distrustful of himself and of the valley Milton
+leant against a tree at the mouth of it and looked disparagingly up the
+river-bed. He wished Sydney had not asked him to meet her here.
+
+He had spent the morning writing to his brother and sister to tell them
+about his engagement, and it worried him that he had forgotten to post
+the letters and was still carrying them round in his pocket. He knew
+them to be lively and expressive and likely to do him credit on their
+arrival in England, having just enough manly glow about them and just
+enough boyish reticence. His flair for a right note was a perpetual
+temptation to cynicism, and his consciousness that these letters so
+bound to strike a note of sincerity _were_ in intention sincere and had
+been written face to face with himself with a zealous effort to avoid
+misrepresentation, did not make him any better at ease about them. He
+wondered if anyone ever tried to describe the experiences of love
+without a bottomless suspicion of imposing upon themselves, of falsity.
+Momentous letters should be posted white-hot; they impinge too much on
+the memory, are weighed over and over again by the conscience. He felt
+an indecorum in going to meet Sydney with these in his pocket, these
+meanly adequate little summings up of his position vis-à-vis to herself,
+his praises of her already qualified by a faint possessiveness. So at
+least he assured himself; it was a pretty enough scruple for a leisurely
+lover, in this little world of suspended activity where there was time
+for the finest of shades. But he pressed on it rather too eagerly.
+Deeper than this, beyond the domain of scruple, he was not at ease.
+
+Their meetings, since the night of his conversation with Mrs. Kerr, had
+been of the type disturbed and momentary, whose sum total is an effort
+of separation. Was he apprehensive of meeting her again in this bare
+narrow place, the stage for a crisis, where no side-issue could offer
+itself to be grasped at and there would be nowhere to escape to from
+Mrs. Kerr and all she had said? Since their talk in the lounge Mrs. Kerr
+had been with him unceasingly; his thoughts even in sleep were full of
+anguished reasonings with her. He did not cease to batter, crying “No,
+no, no!”, against the shut doors of her eloquent reserve. The more
+clearly he remembered how little Sydney’s infinitely loyal friend had
+actually said the more did he despair of Sydney’s lover for having
+understood so much. The thought of Sydney waiting for him now (if she
+had not been impatient and gone away) in all good faith at the top of
+the valley, of the all-assuming confidence she had in him which seemed
+the curiously simple and yet perfect flowering of her strange nature,
+like flowers springing out on a bare almond-tree, destroyed his
+confidence in himself.
+
+Next week Milton would go back to England. He had written this to his
+brother, taking some pleasure in committing himself definitely to the
+arrangement, but the fate of the good resolution lay with the unposted
+letters, still in his own control. He would go back, and she a little
+later would follow him; or she might even prefer to come back with him
+now. Could she wish to stay longer? Her tie with the Hotel (that still
+exerted, he was aware, an agonizing restraint) had better be broken off
+summarily, at the cost of he could not tell how much damage to her
+integrity, without help from himself, without a word from him that her
+confidence did not invite. They had mentioned Mrs. Kerr frequently, but
+there had never been more than a little head of her stamped as it were
+for circulation on a conversational coin. They had not talked of her,
+she had not in person entered their field.
+
+In a week, perhaps, the coast and hills would have vanished forever for
+both of them: he did not think that either he or she would return. A
+year from now it would need an effort of memory to bring the place to
+life again for a moment; he would start at its name and realize that it
+had been without them both, after all, some shadowy continuity. If an
+earthquake were to ruin the town or a landslide demolish the whole coast
+he thought he would be left with hardly a pang once the horror subsided.
+The place would persist unimpaired in his memory, not much loved,
+scarcely thought of but rarely complete if he happened to turn to it; as
+the least loved, most rarely revisited plans often remain. The momentary
+impacts of colour and smells and lights on his senses that had built up
+the place for him would be forgotten, only the sum of them that he might
+have received in an idle half-day would remain. A thousand hours
+superimposed on each other would melt into one; a thousand that had in
+turn been unique, coloured differently each from the others by mood or
+circumstance.
+
+“Will she ever,” he wondered, “be so complete to me; not a succession of
+moments but one? Will these evenings, mornings, lights, memories,
+shadows, half-apprehensions, glimpses ever fall away or run together and
+be merged in the whole of her? Could I love her so well if they were? Is
+there a human being any more than a Godhead with which one could bear to
+be face to face?”
+
+He left the tree and started at a good pace up the valley. A stone which
+somebody might have thrown came bounding down from the heights and
+struck the river-bed; later on a couple of goats following one another
+across an almost perpendicular piece of hill looked down at him
+sardonically. “So much for you,” they intimated and blinked their onyx
+eyes. Presently he met Sydney and Ronald coming to meet him at a
+swinging pace down the river-bed. They were so deep in conversation and
+were making such a noise among the stones that for a minute or two they
+neither heard nor noticed him. Ronald was flushed and looked interested;
+the inequalities of the ground shook his words, which came at a great
+rate out of him and kept the lock of hair flopping up and down on his
+forehead. His arms swung loose and were flung out sideways occasionally
+to help maintain, when a stone rolled sharply from under him, a
+precarious balance. Milton noticed that the two were like each other;
+they had the same build and the same carriage and might have been
+brother and sister—to, he believed, the advantage of both. He realized
+that this was the first time he had ever seen them together. It would be
+the last time, also, perhaps. They had been foredoomed in the very
+nature of things to miss one another. Biting his lip he looked back—had
+he been instrumental? There was pathos for him in this ghost of a
+contact, well-timed in this drained-out colourless ghost of a day.
+Angrily, with a sense of destruction he put up his hands and shouted.
+
+Sydney started, her face turned vividly towards him and she waved her
+walking-stick, then came hurrying down the river-bed, springing for
+speed’s sake from boulder to boulder clear of the loose stones.
+“Slacker!” she exclaimed, “Rotter, James!” Her soft hatbrim flapped back
+in the wind of her motion, the ends of her bright scarf fled through the
+air behind her. She was radiant and boisterous. Ronald, who had been
+making a good point, remained in mid-stream behind her shutting his
+mouth reluctantly.
+
+“Where have you been?” she cried breathlessly, “If I’d the slightest
+grain of proper female pride I shouldn’t look at you.... I told this
+Ronald hours ago that you’d be coming any minute; that if you didn’t
+mountains would have slid on you. And here we find you hardly even
+hurrying!” She scrambled up the bank and took his arm.
+
+“I had no idea—I didn’t mean to delay.”
+
+“You must have been thinking,” said Sydney; “it’s really too bad of
+you.” With animation she waved Ronald forward, and Ronald, coming up
+after her made a benevolent third till they came to a point where a
+parting of ways became possible. Here he nodded good-bye and made off by
+a steep track that doubled back up the side of the hill. Going up he
+whistled, turned once or twice to stare out over their heads at the sea
+and showed plainly that he had forgotten or at least was no longer
+concerned with them. It was Milton, not Sydney, who kept looking after
+him rather uncertainly, as though he had half a mind to call him back,
+until Ronald disappeared into a fold of the hill. Too light-heartedly,
+Ronald had shaken them off.
+
+“Do let’s not think about Ronald,” Sydney said, recalling him with a
+sigh; “I should like us just to be together.”
+
+“But my dear....”
+
+“Aren’t we happy?” she rather fiercely exclaimed.
+
+He nodded. “And you know,” he said and pressed her arm gently, “that
+silences me.”
+
+“I can’t see anything to be silent about,” said she and smiled
+crookedly. “Kiss me!”
+
+“How horribly quiet it is,” she said still with a hand on his arm as he
+let her go again. “Don’t remind me _I_ came here: I won’t ever again—an
+experiment’s failed. James, I won’t let you be happy if you mean to
+surround me with silences—sinister silences that bulge like a bubble and
+never quite burst.”
+
+He laughed. “You don’t like the ineffable.”
+
+“Nothing’s ineffable.”
+
+“You are.”
+
+“No, I’m not. I am not elemental and dumb. If you like I’ll explain
+myself perfectly. Now be practical: talk about plans. Have you written
+those letters?”
+
+“I wrote them this morning.”
+
+“That is splendid. I do want to feel we’ve got some sort of attachment
+outside this improbable place. I wrote last night and slipped down last
+thing when the lounge was quite empty to put them into the concierge’s
+box. It was locked so I couldn’t take them out again and I went to bed
+hugging myself. When did you post yours?”
+
+“I haven’t posted them yet,” he said ruefully.
+
+“Oh, why _didn’t_ you?” she exclaimed, then recovered herself
+confusedly. “I mean, doesn’t that make me seem horribly eager? But I had
+to, I couldn’t resist it; I couldn’t go on carrying this bomb about.
+They’ll all say, at home, ‘Well, what _has_ she done now?’ They’ll be
+quite sure that there must be something wrong somewhere because I
+somehow always just manage not to do anything right. All the people I
+like are rotters. I can’t pay my bills. If I don’t use my brains I get
+dissipated, and if I do use my brains I get ill. I wonder if you’ve any
+idea what I’m like—well, I don’t mean that exactly, I’m sure you’ve got
+heaps of ideas about me. But I don’t think you’re much good at
+outlines—you see a kind of haze of possibilities with a very faint
+nucleus. It’s a fatal combination, I’m sure, to be clever and kind, you
+can never see clear: it’s a sort of a squint. The stupidest person out
+here could describe me immediately.”
+
+“I tell you one thing we have in common,” said Milton—“we do both like
+running ourselves down. I shall never tell you what I’ve thought about
+myself—I couldn’t bear you to agree with me.”
+
+“I should hate you to believe all I’ve said. You never would, James,
+would you?”
+
+“Not while you look with those eyes——”
+
+“Oh yes, yes, yes,” she said and sighing and shutting her eyes leaned
+her head on his shoulder. “I do love you.” With his arms round her he
+began to speak impetuously but she pressed a hand over his mouth to
+silence him and kept it there while she went on—“There is nobody else in
+the world now, nobody else in the world. I’ve thought so much about you.
+I want to be with you always. You’re so kind.” He felt the hand tremble
+and drew it away to say——
+
+“Kind?”
+
+“Yes, kind. Do you think that is ordinary? Do you know, I thought you
+were never coming. I was so afraid, up here this afternoon that you
+wouldn’t come at all. I thought you’d been sent away from me. I thought
+Someone knew better.”
+
+“Who could know better?” he said with a cold feeling.
+
+“Oh, _I_ don’t know,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I am an idiot. Come
+on, let’s walk faster; it’s beginning to be chilly. One loses one’s way
+in the day here when there’s no sun.”
+
+They went quickly on in the direction of the convent, anxious to be
+clear of the valley; discussing as they walked their plans for the
+immediate future. Sydney promised that if Tessa could spare her she
+would go back with Milton to England; though if Tessa seemed at all
+reluctant she should feel obliged to stay on another three or four
+weeks. They agreed to be married in June. “I do hope,” she said, smiling
+doubtfully, “that I shan’t be utterly useless to you.” Before they came
+out on to the road she stopped him again and said she was hungry and
+wanted to eat some more nuts. She took a handful of walnuts and almonds
+out of her pocket and he cracked them by two for her, one against the
+other, between the palms of his hands.
+
+“I wonder why I can’t do that,” she exclaimed, “my hands are really like
+iron!... I’ve been eating these on and off all to-day, they are better
+than lunch.”
+
+“Extraordinary idea!” he exclaimed and threw up his hands expressively.
+She replied that her day appeared to her to have been spent
+intelligently and that she was not yet incapable of planning out a day
+for herself, though she could not answer for what might become of her
+after marriage.
+
+He suggested that if she were not now too tired and hungry they should,
+instead of returning tamely to the Hotel by the road, strike out across
+the base of the next two hills and drop down on the Hotel through the
+olive-trees. The alacrity with which she jumped at this made him suspect
+her of flagging inwardly but he did not dare to withdraw his suggestion.
+Seen again from the mouth of the valley the horizon, the suddenly
+revealed expanse of sky, appeared beyond all memory to have enlarged
+themselves. He could not have believed in such clear air. The afternoon
+was yet more coldly grey, the trees stood out from one another in the
+absolute distinctness of this hour before they should begin to run
+together into dusk. Under the opaque sky the sea was white, glassy
+except where now and then a hundred ripples gave the effect of a shiver.
+Here and there a cyprus waited, dark among the olives. The evening had
+an ache about it, a hush of timelessness, and Milton wondered if he
+should forget this too. They walked in the half-light of the olive-trees
+as though deep down under water; Sydney’s face was pale and some
+deception of shadow made it look melancholy but the colours of her scarf
+burnt. “This is a wonderful thing,” he said and caught at the end of the
+scarf. “I love it. I like all the colours you wear, especially white——”
+
+“That’s not——”
+
+“Yes, it is. It’s the clearest and brightest. Don’t ever be frightened
+and muddled and dark, my dear, even in clothes.”
+
+“But, James, for a clergyman’s wife—I can’t wear scarlet and
+flame-colour. Your life——”
+
+“Do you think of that as muddled and dark?” he said, realizing how
+little they knew each other and how difficult it would be for her ever
+to know him.
+
+“I don’t think of it, I think of you. I confess I don’t half like the
+sound of it.”
+
+“But, Sydney—” He glanced round a moment as though Mrs. Kerr were behind
+him, smiling at Sydney.
+
+“But we’re going to live it. Any life would look bad from the brink; if
+we had to make the decision we’d probably never be born. But most lives
+are the same, I’m sure, once one’s in mid-stream. Ours will be lovely.
+But you won’t see me often again in a Roman scarf.”
+
+“Don’t change, don’t be different,” he cried. “I love you so much as you
+are.” She looked at him in reproach: at that moment he loved her as
+sharply as though she already were lost to him. He snatched at the
+moment and, letting go of everything, asked to be carried away by it;
+shutting his eyes to be nearer and holding her close. They were both
+blotted out, himself and herself were forgotten: he came to a brink.
+
+Time carried him on again after he could not say how long a cessation of
+being. He knew that through all this the hill had been waiting with
+their two figures upon it framed in solitude. Coming back to her there
+in his arms at a sound or a movement she made he did not dare to ask her
+where she had been. Eye to eye they looked at each other questioningly
+as though trying to learn from one another if they had been together,
+then each looked away as though afraid to read they had been forgotten.
+
+“I’m rather afraid,” she said, making a movement to break away from him,
+and in answer to all his questions kept repeating, “I _am_ rather
+afraid.” He could smile at this, feeling exalted; he let her go but
+later drew an arm of hers through his own and made her walk on again.
+Her air was irresolute, she seemed to be trying to shape her thoughts
+into words. She said at last, having looked again at him solemnly as
+though enjoining him to understand this better than she could—“Haven’t
+we—or I, at least, for my part—undertaken rather too much?”
+
+He saw some shadow of what she meant but nothing more than a shadow. He
+was inclined to take her gesture as traditional, her mood as generic,
+she was a young woman—very young as a woman. With compressed lips she
+withdrew her arm. “Oh, no,” she said, “why should I ask you? The
+difficulty is my own.”
+
+“No, look here, Sydney ... why should we be afraid? It’s a way out for
+us both—can’t you see it so?—a way out of ourselves. Don’t you remember
+the boy—Curdy—in the fairy tale who opened a door straight on to the
+sky and was told to walk through it? He didn’t like it at
+all—naturally—there was just the sky there and some of the stars were
+under him. However he went forward and just found himself walking—he had
+no idea how. If we go straight ahead——”
+
+“I’d have gone back through the door. I’m not the stuff for a fairy
+tale. I’ve no faculty of wonder, James. Nothing is new to me.”
+
+He didn’t like to say, “Do I offer you nothing, then?” He found himself
+guilty of having supposed that he did. She was new to him in every
+aspect, in all that she was and meant. He could not imagine a time when
+he would not take a stranger’s pleasure in looking at her across a room.
+He could not imagine a time when her movements would be calculable to
+him, or when she would cease to reappear just as he had not expected
+from behind the veil of his thought.
+
+“I think you’re wrong there,” he said gently. “After all, you haven’t
+lived so very long. You may be surprised——”
+
+She interrupted him here, not by saying anything but by an odd silence.
+Her face had a strained kind of stillness as though it might at any
+moment break up into tears. She tramped beside doggedly, as though she
+were really very tired, along the rough track, ducking her head
+mechanically now and then to avoid the branches. She seemed so drawn
+away from him that he could not realize his arms had been round her a
+moment ago. He cried, “Sydney, you’re not happy!” The exclamation was
+torn from him, he would have given much to recall it.
+
+“I tell you I am,” she said obstinately and coldly, “if you’re happy,
+I’m happy.” She managed to make him feel he had blustered at her and he
+said, with less warmth, “Oh very well, my darling, I don’t want to bully
+you.” He had never been in love before and he had never quarrelled with
+anybody. This he supposed was now (or would soon be) a “lovers’ quarrel”
+coming with a too-obliging promptness to link up for him the two
+experiences. Was this then a glimpse of their composite
+temper—irrational, touchy and vain? He longed to ask her this—he
+believed her to be saner than he was. His face, bright with an
+incommunicable glow of speculation, suddenly angered her.
+
+“Anyhow—_happy_!” she cried, “what _is_ happiness—what comes out of it?
+Why must we always be feeling each other’s pulses to see if we’re
+happy?” She flung the word at him distastefully. It had evidently
+nothing to do, where she was concerned, with the purest, most exhausting
+kind of nervous exaltation and she could make no use of it. He could
+have wept for her, and longed to say, “Can’t you be more of a woman?”
+Instead he smiled with an effect of tolerance and said, “You are very
+impatient.”
+
+“Oh, really,” said she.
+
+“You jump on your feelings and put a pistol up to their heads to make
+the poor creatures explain themselves. You don’t give them a chance. You
+don’t, honestly, Sydney, give them a chance.” He spoke with some energy.
+
+“Oh, all right, all right,” said Sydney, “don’t shout at me, James! the
+wood is quite quiet: I hear—I hear you quite well.”
+
+She did not, after all, make him angry by this, he looked round through
+the trees in surprise, seemed to accept a reproof from the quiet line of
+the sea, and agreed with her. “Yes, the wood is quiet. I’ve been making
+a horrible noise. I’ll——”
+
+“Now _don’t_ make a silence——”
+
+“Yes, I’m going to—listen——”
+
+She clutched at his arm with elaborate manifestations of terror. They
+listened.
+
+“I won’t let you,” she cried, “you shan’t—it’s as bad as the valley. How
+we ever sleep at the Hotel with all this saving itself up behind us and
+that idiotic little tame sea slipping up and down, up and down the
+beach, I can’t think.” She stamped her foot and shouted again and again;
+an echo woke up in the hills. “Now we’ve got a noise again, now we’re at
+home, James, now we’re perfectly at home.”
+
+“Sydney—” Something had caught his attention, he looked speechlessly at
+her, there was something he wanted to ask. She went ahead of him, her
+bright scarf flickered ahead like a flame through the olives. He took
+some long strides to catch up with her. “Sydney”—he said.
+
+“James?”
+
+“You won’t mind coming home with me. You’ve _no_ qualms about leaving
+this place?”
+
+All her high spirits came back to her. “Never a qualm,” she said loudly
+and cheerfully, and looked at him with a bright eye. “Never a qualm....”
+
+
+
+
+                                 XXIII
+
+
+Tessa was so happy about Sydney’s engagement. She wrote long letters
+about it to her husband Anthony out in Malay; she spent less time
+upstairs with Baudouin, lying down on the sofa, and more time sitting
+alertly in the drawing-room, glowing at friends. She laid aside her air
+of a devotee and put on all the dignity of matronhood: one could never
+have guessed how well this would become her. The effect on her digestion
+was extraordinary. She smiled indefatigably and followed Sydney about
+with her eyes, and remained on behalf of the abstracted Milton and the
+less than ever approachable Sydney a shining testimony to the efficacy
+for all ills of Love. For the unconscious pair her confidence, had they
+taken their stand on it, might have been as a rock among the tangled
+undercurrents of criticism, of amusement, of pity, of speculation as to
+“whether it would last.” The thing was more than suitable; it was a
+coming together for which Time itself might have laboured to shape the
+couple; one could not look her in the face and deny the possibility. Her
+friends sighed out that they at least were glad _she_ was glad. Mrs.
+Kerr remarked: “That dear little woman looks positively bridal.”
+
+Everybody, Tessa thought, was being so nice to her Sydney; charming
+things were said to the girl in her presence, and many others she had
+happened to miss were reported. She glowed for her brilliant Sydney,
+loved her better than ever and became speechlessly shy of her. Of Milton
+she was not shy at all, she could talk to him by the hour about Elective
+Affinities, and about Health, which she said was very important. “You
+know there is no need,” she would say looking at him reproachfully, “for
+any of us to be ill at all,” and Milton who had scarcely ever been ill
+in his life would nod back at her wisely. He had a particular softness
+for Sydney’s dear little cousin. She told him how wonderful it would be
+to her to see Sydney in a home of her own and with children, who would
+be, she was sure, the supreme children. “And I’m sure,” she would add,
+“that you’ll both be so wise and bring them up right, quite right from
+the very beginning. Our health you know, has to be built up from the
+very foundations. Our health—” He began to recognize this as the
+recurring decimal point in her conversation.
+
+Tessa thought that it would be so nice for James to get to know Sydney’s
+great friend Mrs. Kerr really well before they all went back to England,
+so she planned a surprise on her own account, hired a car for the
+afternoon and invited Mrs. Kerr and Milton to drive with herself and
+Sydney up to a village high in the hills, from which, she had heard, one
+could look right over a ridge and see a quite unbelievable number of
+other hills whose similarity to one another made one surprised at the
+size of the world. There would be also a church with a very dark,
+old-looking painting and a Patisserie kept by a lady from Nice where
+they gave you an excellent tea. The weather never let Tessa down; the
+afternoon was delicious: Milton sat in front with the driver, Mrs. Kerr
+and Sydney behind; with Tessa, protesting that this was ideally
+comfortable, wedged in tightly between them. The aged Fiat rushed up the
+valley with a rattling sound, screeched at a change of gear and took the
+ascent laboriously. The hill leaned forward over a void and the hundred
+hair-pin corners they bumped round negligently made Tessa catch her
+breath. “We would be killed at any moment,” said Mrs. Kerr, “if Mrs.
+Bellamy were not too valuable.” When they came to the top they got out
+painfully, looked at the view at the other side, then walked out two by
+two to the monastery followed by all the little boys of the town. Tessa
+every now and then whispered to Sydney that Mrs. Kerr and James seemed
+to be making such friends, didn’t they, and getting on excellently. “I
+was sure they would, they are both so clever. I think we’ll keep a
+little further behind them, Sydney; they may be wanting to talk about
+you.”
+
+The painting in the church was so dark that it might have been anything;
+Tessa could not help wondering why no connoisseur had already discovered
+it. The idea of this possible beauty stored up in secrecy made her quite
+dumb; she gripped Milton and Sydney each by an arm and forced them to
+stand and look up at it. She hoped that they might understand the
+picture better than she did and say what she felt about it, but when
+after a moment or two of attention they simply turned to smile at one
+another across her she felt constrained to put forward, “There’s
+something _about_ that face.... I know there’s something about the
+expression. If only it could be cleaned a little without destroying the
+value.... I should never feel the same, you know, about any picture in
+Florence; they are so _known_....” The air of the church was stale with
+the incense of years, the breath of long-dead congregations had not been
+disturbed; it was cold with the exhalations of stone forever in
+darkness. Mrs. Kerr wandered off by herself and stood in abstraction in
+front of the altar; a shaft of light from a window above her leant solid
+across the gloom. “I expect,” thought Tessa, “she is really very
+religious,” and she felt stirred again, as she had been by the picture.
+She kept the others waiting about because she did not like to interrupt
+Mrs. Kerr—she had always known that there was something _in_ Mrs. Kerr
+and at the moment perhaps it was near them. “I can’t stand this air any
+longer, I shall be sick,” exclaimed Sydney suddenly, and after a last
+glance towards the altar pushed aside the leather curtain over the door
+and went out hurriedly. The church stood on the rim of hill between the
+known and unknown landscapes, a melancholy outpost, and it would be
+pleasanter for Sydney to wait outside, though not, Milton seemed to
+think, to wait alone: he went out after her. Tessa sat down by herself
+at the end of the church and presently, after one or two uncertain
+glances round her, knelt.
+
+Milton had managed to dispel the swarm of little boys who having
+presented a bunch of flowers to Sydney with a complimentary address had
+demanded to be paid for them; the three now intimate friends of the
+happy Tessa walked back with her to the village unaccompanied; talking
+and laughing in the manner of excursionists between the walls of blue
+air. The village, heaped up high in its walls, achieved another of these
+miracles of balance; it was the same as many other villages that they
+had explored, but as it was for the afternoon Tessa’s they exclaimed at
+its charm and oddity. Inside it was half-dark, noisome and complicated,
+with whistles of cold air spouting at them through archways, down
+staircases dark enough to be blind and from cellar doors. They entered
+the Patisserie with misgivings, but were let out unexpectedly from the
+end of a passage on to a terrace that overhung the void and let them see
+the extent of the further valley. They crossed over to the railing,
+spread out their hands there and sighed at the view. Milton turned aside
+to yawn irrepressibly two or three times; this was the effect that
+distances always produced on him. They stood in a row, close together,
+Mrs. Kerr and Sydney were side by side.
+
+“Large world ...” said Mrs. Kerr, vaguely waving.
+
+“Very.”
+
+“Sydney will remember this when she goes back to England,” said Tessa,
+who though she had travelled a great deal always felt there was only
+_one_ view. In her memory one gave place to another kaleidoscopically:
+there was only one at a time.
+
+“Oh, but don’t talk about Sydney going away,” said Mrs. Kerr. “It will
+be terrible. But surely, Sydney, you don’t think of going just yet?”
+
+“Oh, next week, we expect,” said Sydney. “We think it will be better to
+get back before the rush begins.”
+
+“_I_ shall be the rush,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I am so stupid, I never
+realize one’s come to the end of the season anywhere until I find
+everybody going away at once.”
+
+“And then,” suggested Milton, “you don’t get a place in the train.”
+
+“I always seem to get a place in the train; it’s very curious. But isn’t
+this a little too unselfish of you, Mrs. Bellamy, letting him take
+Sydney away from you so soon?”
+
+“It was my idea,” said Tessa at once. She had come to believe this.
+
+“I wouldn’t for worlds—” began Milton.
+
+“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t really,” smiled Mrs. Kerr. “But one doesn’t
+have the chance of bringing a Sydney back with one every day.” There was
+a pause in which she looked thoughtfully down at Sydney’s hand on the
+railing beside her, then laid her own over it. “They are all going
+away,” she said to Tessa, “all the young ones. Ronald’s going quite soon
+too—down to Sicily.”
+
+“Oh dear—oh dear,” sighed Tessa in placid deprecation of the laws of
+change. A lump rose in her throat as she too saw Mrs. Kerr’s hand lying
+in Sydney’s. Partings were terrible. Ought she to move away gently with
+Milton to the other end of the terrace?
+
+“But perhaps,” said Mrs. Kerr, “you two’ll come back here together some
+day. I shall imagine you here.”
+
+“Thanks,” said Milton and laughed uncertainly. “Do!”
+
+Sydney took no notice of what was being said, she did not seem as though
+she had heard. She stood between Tessa and Mrs. Kerr as inanimate and
+objective as a young girl in a story told by a man, incapable of a
+thought or a feeling that was not attributed to her, without a
+personality of her own outside their three projections upon her:
+Milton’s fiancée, Tessa’s young cousin, Mrs. Kerr’s protégée, lately her
+friend.
+
+“Sydney,” Milton asked her loudly, “_shall_ we come back here?”
+
+“Oh, yes,” she said mechanically, “do let’s. Do let’s come back here—I’m
+so fond of this place.”
+
+When they had finished tea they went back to the piazza outside the
+village to look for the Fiat, and having found the Fiat had to search
+further afield for their driver, a brigandish individual in a check cap
+who returned to them with reluctance. “Such a nice afternoon,” Mrs. Kerr
+smiled retrospectively as they slid away from the village, and as the
+keen air rushed forward to meet them, she drew down her chin luxuriously
+into the collar of her fur coat. The car swerved violently at the first
+of the corners and Sydney who had taken Tessa’s place in the middle was
+flung sideways with her cheek against the fur. “I wish there were not
+such a long way to go,” remarked Tessa, who after one look down had
+drawn quickly back and shut her eyes. “It’s not like motoring at all,
+it’s more like _dropping_.”
+
+“Perhaps—” said Sydney and broke off because it was not fair to Tessa.
+She sat back quietly and began to concentrate her whole will and
+imagination. “If it could be the next corner,” she thought, “we should
+go over clean—there is that clear drop. Let it be the next corner....”
+But the next corner was passed. The rush of air and the movement had
+made her come alive again and she seemed to herself to be reasoning very
+clearly and accurately. There would be nobody really to suffer except
+poor old Anthony, out in Malay. She did not suppose James’s brother and
+sister would care very much; she did not feel him to have been loved
+more than conventionally, to have ever so faintly quickened a passion or
+coloured a life. “As for Ronald,” she thought, very keen and exultant as
+though there were a sword in her hand, “it would be better for Ronald.”
+She fixed her eyes on the back of the driver’s head and began to be
+perfectly sure of what was coming, perfectly confident.
+
+“We mustn’t go over too quickly,” she thought, “there must be time to
+say something.” Under the rug her hand found out Mrs. Kerr’s sleeve and
+rested there ever so lightly. She racked her brain for all there would
+be to say, then relinquished the effort. At all events there would be a
+moment to look at each other, just to look at each other that would be
+best. “I don’t want to look at James—there is always that question of
+the future. I should be very much embarrassed.” Her mind became quite
+quiet again and she went on saying: “The next corner ... the _next_
+corner.”
+
+Round the next, barely round it, the brakes jarred, the car swayed on
+locked wheels, and stopped dead. The driver swore, peered ahead left and
+right, stood up in his place to give vent to what he was saying and
+swore more vehemently. Milton also rose in his place to see better and
+their view from behind was obscured. They had seen in a flash a long
+wagon of timber jammed cross-ways, shouting men, backing, terrified
+horses. Milton, after a moment, turned smiling to reassure them. “The
+idiots,” he said, “have been making a mess of this turn. They’re all
+right, but we may have some time to wait till they’re clear. The end of
+the timber’s got jammed against the rock, they must have been as nearly
+as possible over.”
+
+“So, I suppose, were we?” Mrs. Kerr said, amused.
+
+Milton nodded, after a half-glance at Sydney. “Our fellow _can_ drive,”
+he said gratefully. “We’re here for a bit—would you care to get out and
+have a look?”
+
+Sydney shook her head. With both hands clasped on her lap she sat quite
+still, defeated. She could not look at Milton, who helped out Mrs. Kerr
+and Tessa and walked with them up to the wagon. In a minute or two he
+was back. “I say, aren’t you coming?” She shook her head again stonily.
+“Sydney ... has this given you rather a shock?”
+
+She was plainly what people describe as “upset.” “They’ve no right to
+bring those things up here,” he angrily shouted.
+
+“Well, they must build their houses, my dear.” It was the tolerance of
+lassitude. She looked over the side of the car down into the valley: a
+kind of farewell. It was a long way below—the depth of it would never be
+forgotten.
+
+“Funny we shouldn’t have seen it ahead of us,” said Milton, thinking
+about the wagon, “or underneath us. It’s the way the rocks stick
+out—pretty dangerous, I must say.”
+
+She agreed. “Pretty dangerous. Look here, I will come; but go on with
+the others. I’ll just stay here a moment or two.”
+
+They were having—up here—a later view of the sun than their friends down
+below; by now the tennis-courts would be silent, the sea fading, the
+earliest lights coming out pale and exotic in hotels whose walls still
+had an afterglow. Here the sun was still full on the village, level on
+peak behind peak; the gold only gave way reluctantly to a mild rose,
+that chilled and abated and was transfused by shadows mounting up like
+smoke out of the valley. This isolation above the regular approach of
+night connected itself in her mind with her present shocked sense of
+having been flung back on to living. The depths of shadow from which
+they were barred away would have been to her infinitely grateful. Above,
+in this unnatural, endless prolongation of the daylight she for the
+first time felt life sharply, life as keen as death to bite upon the
+consciousness pressed inexorably upon her, held to her throat like a
+knife. Dazed by a realization of their import she stared at her hands,
+at her body, at the hills round her.
+
+Later she had scrambled from the car and was running down the hill on
+her stiff legs unsteadily, calling to James.
+
+Round the wagon a tumult was raging of admonition, sympathy and abuse.
+Several young men had sprung out of nowhere and were straining, shouting
+and heaving, alternately propping stones under the wheels of the wagon
+then trying to push the wagon forward over the stones. Other young men
+and some women came scrambling down in a state of happy excitement by a
+precipitous path from the village that struck down direct across the
+zig-zags of the road. Friends of the wagoner kicked the horses in the
+chest to make them back further, tugged them forward by the bridles and
+almost incessantly beat them over the head. Sydney saw Milton, scarlet
+and also shouting, trying to stop this and being swept aside amicably as
+one who knew nothing of the carting of timber or of the management of
+horses. Tessa, only too glad to be out of the Fiat, was trotting up and
+down like a little bear in her fur coat. No one, evidently, could have
+been sorrier for the poor horses than Mrs. Kerr, but she was trying to
+restrain Milton from further interference because he ran a momentary
+danger of being elbowed over the edge of the road. As Sydney approached,
+the situation was further complicated by a short log working loose from
+the pile, slipping down sideways and getting locked between the
+far-apart spokes of the wheel.
+
+“It’s all so damned silly!” cried Milton exasperatedly. The crisis
+brought out in him at the expense of his rationality all that was
+latently English. Mrs. Kerr shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
+
+“One of these horses is bleeding,” he added in helpless disgust.
+
+“Then come away,” said Mrs. Kerr. “After all, we’re not asked to more
+than imagine what animals suffer. We aren’t asked to be certain—it
+mayn’t be so bad. I think I’ll go back to the car.”
+
+Milton only half understood what she said and did not hear Sydney
+calling him. His attention was all for the horses. “They ought at
+least,” he exclaimed later on, “to have warned us up there in the
+village that this was ahead.” He turned to find Sydney there pale at his
+elbow and Mrs. Kerr gone.
+
+“Will they be long?” she said anxiously. He nodded and she put a hand on
+his sleeve and guided him up the road again, past the Fiat where Tessa
+and Mrs. Kerr were sitting again, wrapped up in rugs. Sydney looked at
+them vacantly, turned to Milton to say something with the same air of
+vacancy, saw with alarm that the car was still close behind them and
+hurried him on to get further out of earshot. “I’m afraid,” she said,
+“that it’s quite impossible.”
+
+He understood by some odd intuition; but kept her watching him for a
+moment or two while he listened intently to the clamour below, the
+isolated exclamations, the voices. “What’s quite impossible, Sydney?
+What do you mean?”
+
+“Our marriage.”
+
+“Oh!” he said quietly. “Oh!”
+
+“I don’t know how we could ever have thought of it.”
+
+“I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “I can’t see yet why it’s not right.”
+
+She looked hopeless. “I suppose I can’t make you see. But I do know.”
+
+“Since when?” She seemed protected by some kind of exaltation, so he let
+out his pain in sarcasm. “Recently, Sydney?”
+
+“Just now. I suppose it was the shock of being alive—oh, how can I
+explain to you? I had had no idea we were as real as this. I’d never
+realized it mattered so much.... Oh my dear, no, don’t touch me. Come
+further—come round the bend of the road.”
+
+“I wasn’t going to touch you,” he said, ashamed for both of them, half
+aware that an instinctive movement towards her must have been
+exaggerated by the effect of distance she gave him. By some defect of
+focus he had seen her as a long way away. They went up the hill
+painfully, as though it were steeper and turned the next corner which
+gave her back a kind of echo, a ghost of that early idea of deliverance.
+Further up she sat down on a bank by the side of the road; because she
+looked tired enough to fall sideways he sat down close to her, put an
+arm round her and propped her up against a brotherly shoulder. “Now tell
+me,” he said, “if you feel you can tell me.”
+
+“_Now_ I understand—but it seems as if I ought to tell you what I didn’t
+understand. I think we have been asleep here; you know in a dream how
+quickly and lightly shapes move, they have no weight, nothing offers
+them any resistance. They are governed by some funny law of convenience
+that seems to us perfectly rational, they clash together without any
+noise and come apart without injury.”
+
+“Do you think we’ve been ruled by this funny law of convenience?”
+
+“Yes,” she said without hesitation, but putting a hand out as though to
+propitiate him. “We have taken nothing into account. You and me—how
+could we ever have thought of it? It was just a dream. It seemed
+simple.”
+
+“It never seemed simple to me. I was going to fight every inch of it.”
+
+“But you’re not—” she began, broke off, and in a manner at once intimate
+and very impersonal leaned closer against his shoulder.
+
+“Not what?” he said, urging this out of her.
+
+“Not a fighter.”
+
+“Not a born fighter perhaps ... I thought we could help each other.”
+
+“Never. You could never have thought that.”
+
+“If I am to let you go I shall have to learn to say ‘Never.’”
+
+“Say it now—or shall I have to tell you everything?”
+
+“I would rather you did. But no; the laws of convenience. I think I
+could guess what is coming ... Sydney?”
+
+She did not answer. He saw her hand stealing up to her face and
+discovered that tears were coming out from under her eyelids and that
+she was trying to brush them away with the tip of a finger. “I haven’t
+got a handkerchief,” she said as she felt him detect this. “I left it
+behind in the car.” He managed still with an arm round her, shifting his
+position gently so as not to disturb her, to extract a clean
+handkerchief that he had pushed up his cuff.
+
+“Thank you,” she said, crumpling up the handkerchief and staring at it.
+“You are, you are comfortable.”
+
+“So they tell me,” said he and his mouth twisted in momentary bitter
+repudiation of comfortableness.
+
+“I’d rather do this alone, if you don’t mind,” she said, as the tears
+began to come faster.
+
+“Very well,—shall I walk up and down or will you?”
+
+As she did not answer and did not stir he got up and left her.
+Patrolling their bit of road at absent speed with his hands in his
+pockets he could still feel her head heavy on his shoulder and the
+feeling of intimacy and nearness remained with him. He remembered,
+looking back with pity for them both, that questioning long look in
+which they had been baffled by one another under the olive-trees. At
+this moment of swinging apart he was one with her and was able to say
+“She is right.” Passing by her again and again where she sat he looked
+or did not look; either seemed to be natural. He could feel rather than
+perceive her there sitting upright, her hands on her knees, his
+handkerchief a dead-white blot in the dark. The tide of shadow had risen
+at last and engulfed them, drawing the hills together and making the
+valley seem to float up to them, spreading a film of silence in which
+the clamour from below was diffused. The last of the pink light faded
+slowly from the hills, the moon rose opaque and lustreless in the still
+lucent sky.
+
+“Don’t come till you’re ready,” he called as he saw her getting up
+slowly.
+
+“I’m ready now,” she said, coming towards him. His admission was ready
+for her.
+
+“I do see what you mean,” he said. “I do understand.”
+
+“Is there anything queer about my eyes; would one notice?” she asked,
+and turned her face up to his anxiously. He had to peer close in the
+half-light before he assured her. “No; nobody’d guess.” They turned and
+walked silently back to the car. Tessa was sitting round looking out
+eagerly for them over the back.
+
+“They’ve had an idea,” she cried, “they’re going to saw off that long
+bit of timber. The driver says it was his idea. One of the men is
+fetching a saw.”
+
+“And then we can go on again,” said Mrs. Kerr, making room for Sydney.
+“Why is it so much more tiring to sit still in something that doesn’t
+move?” Sydney climbed silently in and sat between them. By the time they
+had been able to pass the wagon, now drawn back further down into a bay
+of the road, she felt that the evening was already over, that they had
+been home for a long time, that all this had happened a year ago and
+only by some delay of the memory still seemed to concern them. As they
+walked rather slowly up the Hotel steps, weighed down with armfuls of
+wraps, and the disconcertingly keen lights steamed out on to them, Mrs.
+Kerr with an air of coming awake again remarked that Sydney was tired.
+“If you’re not too tired,” she said, “come in on your way up and say
+good-night to me. We shan’t have you many nights more.”
+
+“Thank you,” Sydney said, “but don’t wait up for me. I’ll come early if
+I come at all.” After dinner she went straight to her own room, sleep
+came up over her like a wave as soon as she shut her eyes; a tall dark
+wave that gathered itself and waited above her a moment so that she was
+conscious of it before she was conscious of nothing. Then all night long
+she was climbing up the endless road again corner by corner to an empty
+town at the top.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XXIV
+
+
+“Yet I do think it would be nice of you to go with him as far as Genoa,”
+Mrs. Kerr said to Ronald, three evenings afterwards. At an end of her
+gentle insistence she could do no more; she left the appeal in the air
+to dissolve or solidify, sighed, turned away from her son and took up
+her letters. The appeal stretched out and closed upon Ronald’s
+unwillingness tentacle after shadowy tentacle; he got up and walked
+round Mrs. Kerr’s room uneasily moving his shoulders, writhing mentally
+like the Laocoön and feeling himself constricted at every point.
+
+“Well I am blowed,” he said petulantly. “I really am blowed!” But Mrs.
+Kerr was reading a letter.
+
+Ronald could not understand why two people who had come to this place
+unaware of each other, in perfect integrity and without the intention of
+seeking a mate, should not be allowed to remain here untroubled now that
+a transitory notion of marrying one another had been abandoned. Or if
+they were due to depart, why had they to depart processionally in a long
+train of Spirits Pitiful; regrets, remorses, condolences, noisy emotions
+given the licence of carnival? Mrs. Bellamy was “taking away” Sydney
+(who now had to be bundled about like a lay-figure and spoken of like
+the unillustrious dead) to a place on the French Riviera and later to
+England. Milton was to move on to Florence, even to Assisi; there seemed
+a vagueness as to whether he might not be trusted in proper abandon to
+walk over the very edge of Italy into the sea. He had timed his
+departure, unwittingly, for the same date, the same train as Ronald’s.
+Ronald, appalled by the thought of a journey with one for whom the web
+of a fatal attachment would be with every moment attenuating and
+snapping off strand by strand, had announced to his mother that travel
+with Milton he would not; it could not be done. He proposed to remain
+with her several days more.
+
+“We’d see each other on the platform,” Ronald said, “we should be bound
+to see each other on the platform and we should feel such asses looking
+all round each other and then getting into different carriages.”
+
+“Well, don’t get into different carriages; talk to each other.”
+
+“I really don’t know how to. You see, he would be bound to think I was
+embarrassed. I think he is the sort of man who would rather expect one
+to be.”
+
+Many people were embarrassed by Milton, avoided meeting him in the
+corridors, moved away when he came into the lounge and when they caught
+his eye did not know whether to look and hurried away to complain of
+him. He had expected and hoped that nothing would “come out” until he
+and Sydney had managed to slip away quietly; but in this he had counted
+without her directness—he had written a note on the matter to send to
+her room but on reading it through had destroyed it (it seemed to reek
+with the meanest solicitudes) and had sat with his head in his hands
+unable to write her another. Sydney had “told” Tessa; Tessa, through
+confidantes fatally chosen and an air for the world of reserved
+desolation, let everyone know. He was offered during the tête-à-têtes
+which circumstances or the conscientiousness of a few friends forced on
+him all kinds of silences and found them poor enough meat in his hunger,
+his sudden ache for companionship; silences applied tenderly like a swab
+to a wound, silences held up like a shield, square and blank, silences
+poked across at him gingerly; the silences of Miss Pym, of Colonel
+Duperrier, of Eileen Lawrence. Sensitive to so abashing his world he
+began to feel like a leper. His perturbation as to whether he ought to
+be here, the increasingly sharp little stings with which consciousness
+less of suffering than of being a too-evidently suffering man was
+brought home again and again to him, kept up such a din in his mind that
+thought was impossible. He could not think of Sydney or of what they had
+lost or gained. Now and then he would brace himself and with cold
+exultation look ahead to an ordeal in Florence.
+
+Veronica spoke to him; she gave him all her distracted sympathy then
+took it all back again, in a breath; “There are worse things,” she said,
+“than not being engaged to be married. I would rather do anything on
+earth than meet Victor just now—will you walk down with me and look for
+a court?” That had been early one morning; they had stolen down to the
+courts together and played singles till other people began to assemble.
+He gave her minus-fifteen and she won their three sets. “You know, you
+mustn’t let yourself go to pieces,” she said, shaking her head at him as
+they walked back together. “You used to be good.” “But I’m _melting
+away_ in all this!” exclaimed Milton explosively. Later, as they turned
+in at the Hotel gate she had an idea. “I say, you do marry people, don’t
+you—I mean, professionally? It would be rather a joke if you were to
+marry us. Rather a _grim_ joke, I daresay,” she added with bent brows,
+tighting her racquet-press. But that evening, as with a feverish sense
+of exclusion from everywhere he walked up and down on the gravel, she
+melted ahead of him into the darkness, trailing the wraith of a shawl
+from her shoulders, going down to the sea with her Victor to look at the
+moonlight. She came into the lounge again shining-eyed, mysterious from
+having been kissed, and Milton felt that at least she was not unhappy.
+
+He was haunted by Ronald. Ronald, whenever they met, paused momentarily,
+opened and shut his mouth, seemed always just on the verge of an
+utterance which was to clarify everything and banish confusion. An
+oblique glance, penetrating, but addressed to one another’s features
+rather than eye to eye, would pass between them. Then, smiling
+regretfully as though he had been urgently called away, Ronald would
+shake back the piece of hair from his forehead and dart off. Milton had
+the feeling each time of having been weighed and found wanting. There
+must have been something about him that brought Ronald up dead. He told
+himself this did not matter, he would not see Ronald again, then the
+thought of not seeing Ronald again would itself inexpressibly sadden
+him. The thought of Ronald and Sydney going away in different
+directions, and of the unlikelihood of _their_ ever meeting came to be
+even more painful, the injury was personal, as though one or the other
+or both of them had been part of himself. Every time he met Ronald there
+was the embarrassment, not just of that one moment of failure sharp as
+the slam of a door but of a dozen remembered others mounting up behind
+it.
+
+“I _will_ speak,” Milton said to himself at last and Ronald must have
+come to the same decision, for the next time they met they both began to
+talk at once, irrelevantly and loudly. It was this, chiefly, which had
+made Ronald so unwilling that they should travel together to Genoa.
+Walking about the room he was trying with great difficulty to explain
+this to his mother.
+
+Mrs. Kerr, still with an eye on her letters but with attention dutifully
+withdrawn from her own affairs, raised herself among the cushions and
+turned a little round on the sofa to consider her son’s difficulty.
+
+“I don’t want to sacrifice you, my darling,” she said, “but if you would
+do this you would really oblige me. You see, Ronald, the poor man does
+like you. I thought if you would try and be nice to him—make it all
+easier—just for an hour or two in the train.”
+
+“It’s an Italian train,” said Ronald gloomily.
+
+“I know, I know,” said Mrs. Kerr and nodded in helpless contrition. “I’m
+afraid,” she went on irrelevantly, “he feels sore about this—He feels——”
+
+“_Sore?_” echoed Ronald. “Ridiculous! Sore?”
+
+“I think so, a little ... with me,” said Mrs. Kerr and adjusted the
+shade of the reading-lamp. Her face by that movement emerged from red
+dusk and was shown to her son like a picture, lit up; a face lying
+rather wearily back among the cushions, full of lucidity and gentleness;
+less beautiful at the moment than burning in on his consciousness its
+essential quality, mental or spiritual, that he could not define. Ronald
+wondered again if this was what he would learn to call love, or whether
+he would ever experience any other: this feeling of being burnt in upon
+that left no room for desire. “I half think,” Mrs. Kerr went on
+reluctantly, as though she were reading aloud from the confused blotted
+chart of poor Milton’s mind, “that _he_ half thinks I’ve meddled. Of
+course I have a kind of influence over Sydney, but I should never have
+used it to interfere in her love-affairs. I have always wanted her to
+marry and seen that she wanted to marry and though I was surprised just
+at first that she should be able to think about _him_ in that way, they
+both seemed so pleasant with each other that I would have done a great
+deal to help them on.”
+
+It was a strange and sudden relief to Ronald—he could not have said
+why—to hear his mother say all this in a matter-of-fact voice.
+
+“Poor old Milton,” he said once and could not help laughing. Mrs. Kerr
+also smiled, less and less ruefully as his laughter began to infect her.
+“Poor old chap,” said Ronald again, noisily. He waited for what was to
+come next, but his mother seemed to have done speaking. “Of course,” he
+went on, at the same pitch of jocularity, “if it’s a case of the family
+honour ... anything _I_ can do....”
+
+It did sound ridiculous, the way he put it, and Mrs. Kerr smiled again.
+“I should feel happier,” she confessed, “if the poor dear went off more
+or less happily. You see, he does like you.”
+
+“Oh yes, I daresay he does. I daresay he thinks I have a beautiful
+expression and wishes I would come and sing in his choir.”
+
+“Something like that, I daresay. But people are not put in choirs for
+their beautiful expressions—Seriously, Ronald, I’m doing this because I
+want to do anything I can for him. It means a lot to send you away from
+me sooner than you have to go. You see, I’ll be lonely,” said Mrs. Kerr,
+and glanced away from the statement when it was made as though she saw
+it as ugly and trivial.
+
+“Oh Mother....”
+
+He caught at her hand but she drew it away again. “I don’t want you to
+stay and be kind to me. I hope I shall be dead a long time before people
+are kind to me.” She shivered—not, he thought, at death.
+
+“You’re lonely?”
+
+Her eyes took him in, very tiny, and round him the room and the world
+with its tiny people drawn by their hundreds of tides. She nodded and
+her thought passed ahead. “You see,” she said, “I who am what is called
+an attractive person am going to be lonelier than other people, the
+beautiful or the devoted. I shan’t be able to crowd myself round for
+consolation and company with hundreds of little photographs of loving or
+having been loved.”
+
+“A large number of people seem to have loved you,” said Ronald. Though
+shaken, he spoke definitely, very dispassionately. It seemed important,
+so important that his mouth went dry, that his mother should not be
+allowed to go on looking through him and thinking beyond him with that
+peculiar expression. “A large number ...” he repeated.
+
+“No, no one, I think,” said Mrs. Kerr, after a pause in which she tried
+to remember. While she spoke she began glancing through her letters
+abstractedly and with an air of indifference. Then she smiled. “At any
+rate,” she went on, having extracted an envelope that had already been
+opened, “I don’t begin to be lonely just yet—here’s such a charming
+letter, an invitation, from those Emmerys in Paris.”
+
+“Oh, _Margot_ Emmery?”
+
+“Yes, Margot. I am so fond of her. So you, my dear, can run away to
+Sicily.” She tugged gently at a fold of her tea-gown on which he
+happened to be sitting and swept him away from her with a gesture as
+though he were a little boy again and she were sending him off to bed.
+
+“Well, at any rate,” said Ronald nodding, sitting tight on the tea-gown
+and leaning forward to show her he had scored a point, “Sydney is fond
+of you.”
+
+“I suppose she is,” Mrs. Kerr said reflectively.
+
+“Then _why_ ...” began Ronald. “Why on earth....” He stopped again and
+blinked his eyes, as though he had suddenly seen everything as so
+complicated that he could only believe in some defect in his vision.
+Mrs. Kerr gently stirred on the sofa, the loud ticking of the travelling
+clock at her elbow became suddenly audible. Ronald looking round the
+room caught sight of his own photograph—“Ronald”—and thought how odd it
+was that Mrs. Kerr sitting on the sofa beside him should have a son and
+how much odder it was that Ronald should have a mother. He found himself
+arguing very loudly, wisely, and dogmatically and was reminded of the
+only two occasions when he had been drunk. “You’re not fair to
+yourself,” he kept repeating. “You’re not, Mother, you’re not really.
+You _ought_ to be fair....”
+
+She looked up at him once or twice from over Margot Emmery’s letter and
+said presently, “Well, my dear Ronald, I leave that to you—Hush!...
+Listen! Come in!... Ronald, I’m sure I heard somebody. Do go and see who
+it is.”
+
+“It’s Miss Warren,” said Ronald, having opened the door grudgingly, and
+Sydney came in.
+
+She came in doubtfully, carrying a pile of books, with a pair of long
+white leather gloves dangling over her arm. She and Ronald stared at
+each other vaguely and steadily over the reading-lamp, the only light in
+the room. In the red dusk over the shade their faces were blank to each
+other; their features were scarcely visible and their expressions, if
+they had expressions, not visible at all. As it was a spring night the
+window stood open out on to the balcony and now and then the curtains
+were sucked in and swelled out again by a breath of mild air.
+
+“I’ll be getting along,” said Ronald to Sydney.
+
+“Oh no, don’t go,” But the room seemed too small for three people.
+
+Ronald, seeking for and failing to catch his mother’s eye, looked round
+him rather confusedly and finally stepped out between the curtains on to
+the balcony where he lighted a cigarette and doubling his elbows under
+him leaned forward to stare at the sea. The exit was not a happy one, in
+the room behind he remained present yet not present. Sydney put her pile
+of books carefully down on the table and counted them over, then held
+out the pair of gloves to Mrs. Kerr. “I think these are all of your
+books that I had,” said she. “And I think these are your gloves; I must
+have brought them upstairs with me after a walk. I found them among my
+things.”
+
+“So they are!” said Mrs. Kerr and looked at the gloves in pleased
+surprise. “How nice to have them back—but I never missed them. But I do
+wish, my dear, you hadn’t brought all those books back. Wouldn’t you
+keep them? I shall never have room for them all in my trunk.”
+
+“I shouldn’t have room in my trunk either.”
+
+“Not if I wrote your name in them all?”
+
+“I’m afraid I still shouldn’t have room in my trunk,” Sydney said and
+smiled conventionally.
+
+“Then I shall have to give them away to someone else,” said Mrs. Kerr
+with a sigh. “Don’t just hover, Sydney—must you go yet? Stay and sit
+down.”
+
+“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m going through my things to-night and beginning
+to pack—I’d no idea I’d so many. We go, you see, the day after
+to-morrow, and to-morrow night I shall be going out with the Lawrences.”
+
+“Oh, the Lawrences?... Well, I expect it will be very nice for you all
+to spend your last evening together. Are you really going the day after
+to-morrow?”
+
+“Yes. So’s Ronald, isn’t he?”
+
+“He is indeed,” sighed Ronald’s mother. “How time does seem to have
+slipped away from us all.... Mr. Milton and Ronald you know, are hoping
+to travel together.... _Poor_ Mr. Milton...!”
+
+“Yes,” said Sydney, “I suppose he is a good deal laughed at.”
+
+Mrs. Kerr glanced at her with raised eyebrows a moment and bit her lips
+as though she had winced for a moment inwardly. There seemed to be
+depths of crudeness here that she dared not fathom. “Not as far as I
+know, my dear,” she said gently. “Unless, of course, you feel able to
+laugh at him?”
+
+“I’m not much amused really. Do I seem to be much amused?”
+
+Mrs. Kerr looked at her gently and critically. “No, I don’t think you
+do. You do look older, my dear, yes, you certainly have developed. I
+suppose there is nothing like buying experience that somebody else pays
+for.”
+
+“You’re very sensitive to all this,” said Sydney, raising her eyes for
+the first time. “What’s most beautiful about you is your sensitiveness.
+If there’s one thing one might hope to learn from you it would be to be
+sickened and turned cold by cruelty and unfairness. I hope that’s what
+other people have learnt from you. I hope that’s what someone where
+you’re going next will be able to learn too.” Finding that her voice was
+still steady and clear and that she was able to go on she concluded, “I
+am very grateful to you; you have done a great deal for me.”
+
+After a moment’s pause Mrs. Kerr said, with a glance through the
+curtains, “You do remember, don’t you, that Ronald’s on the balcony?”
+
+“No, I haven’t forgotten Ronald.... Good-night, Mrs. Kerr. Good-night,
+Ronald!”
+
+She turned and went back to the door, not quite directly, steering her
+way through the furniture as though she were carefully following back a
+chalk line drawn for her on the floor. While her hand was still on the
+door Mrs. Kerr exclaimed, “Sydney!” incredulously, then later, “Well,
+Sydney—what have I done?” Sydney did pause on the threshold and look
+back uncertainly, Mrs. Kerr held out a hand, then she turned again and
+went out, shutting the door behind her so quietly that Mrs. Kerr and
+Ronald only heard the latch click. Mrs. Kerr catching her breath at the
+sound of the latch, began repeating her name again in such a tone of
+desolation and loneliness that Ronald, driven out against something
+intolerable, rushed through the curtains.
+
+“Why, _Mother_!”
+
+“Make her come back. Go after her, Ronald, and make her come back—I have
+something to say to her.”
+
+“I don’t see that I very well can.”
+
+She stared up, arrested. “Why not?”
+
+“Well, I don’t think she wants to.”
+
+“Ronald....”
+
+“I’m awfully sorry.” But his mother had turned away from him in
+contempt; her eyes were fixed on the door as though under their long,
+strange, relentless compulsion it must open again to deliver up Sydney.
+When he came forward she warded him off with a hand. He did not like to
+look at her and did not know where else to look, so he stumbled back on
+to the balcony where he found still alight a cigarette that he had taken
+out of his mouth an age ago and balanced aslant on the rail. He rolled
+it round between his fingers, considering it, took two or three puffs
+and threw it into the darkness, then remained standing still there,
+waiting to be called back. After waiting for some time his tension began
+to relax again, but looking round at the sky, the sea, the tops of the
+trees he still saw everywhere his mother’s head in the circle of light
+from the reading-lamp imprinted on the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+                                  XXV
+
+
+A one-horse vehicle with a canvas hood called by the English visitors a
+shandrydan came round about three o’clock to drive Mr. Milton and Ronald
+down to the Genoa train. It appeared about half an hour before it had
+been ordered and the limp horse in a bonnet, looking as if it had been
+propped up on its legs precariously, waited on the gravel, indifferent
+to the flies, long enough to advertise to the whole Hotel that somebody
+was going away. Departures at this time of the afternoon were unusual
+and people coming downstairs after the siesta and people on their way
+out to the tennis-courts stood about in the doorway (the double door had
+been fixed back as for the passage of a grand piano) or gathered round
+the foot of the steps to smile at the inefficient way in which the
+concierge, the boots and one of the younger waiters were stacking up the
+light luggage in the box of the shandrydan. Antonio the boots was very
+popular; every time he let Milton’s leather hat-box or one of Ronald’s
+many dispatch cases glissade past him and bounce on to the gravel there
+was laughter and a cry of “Oh, _oh_, Antonio!” And Antonio, knowing this
+to be part of a very amusing English song, would smile woodenly.
+
+Nobody was quite sure how much of a “send-off,” under the circumstances,
+Milton would appreciate; but it was impossible to let pass such an
+excellent opportunity of embarrassing Ronald. Ronald was better liked
+than anybody else in the Hotel had been for a long time; it was always
+easy to be amusing about him, he roused genuine interest and curiosity
+and, in the breasts of those who disliked his mother, an active instinct
+to protect and comfort. In twos and threes for mutual encouragement,
+people were never tired of seeking him out and baiting him, giving him
+articles in the _Morning Post_ to read, tripping him up over statistics
+or twitting him on an attachment to one or other of the Lawrences. He
+was the dearest boy, good humour itself, and one could not doubt that he
+genuinely enjoyed all this. The present prospect of seeing him shake
+hands all round, reply to a dozen mock-tender addresses and blushingly
+double his long legs under the low seat of the shandrydan kept
+tennis-players from courts booked a week ago, wives from buying their
+husbands’ tea and walkers down from the hills.
+
+After the luggage had been arranged there was an interval, then Milton
+took form in the gloom of the lounge and appeared in the doorway, half
+drew back, glanced at his watch and hesitated, smiling uncertainly. In
+spite of a very secular grey squash hat he looked for the first time
+true to type and several people realized sharply that a Church of
+England clergyman had for weeks been among them. The professional aspect
+stamped out the lover, he was once more approachable, showed up even as
+dedicated to approachability. There was a movement towards him. Friends
+gained all in a moment smiled for him up at the unflecked sky and
+congratulated him on his weather, intimates taking him up from before
+the dawn of that interlude regretted his going away loudly and turned in
+anguish to one another with appeals to regret more. He nodded round with
+successive, finished-off little smiles and once or twice visibly
+swallowed. Miss Pym, standing down at the foot of the steps, said to
+herself, “We salute thee who are about to die.”
+
+People on the verge of departure always seemed to her to be saying this;
+there was something about them fated and sacrificial that made her feel
+self-conscious on their behalf yet somehow rather exalted. Presently
+Milton thought of something, murmured and turned back into the lounge.
+The curtain having dropped for a minute with the usual good effect of
+tightening them up to further expectancy, they all turned to one another
+again and said in low voices what a real pity it was that he should be
+going away. All sorts of things that he might have been to them appeared
+suddenly; with things they might have brought to his hearing for
+sympathy, taxed him with or asked him about.
+
+Ronald came running down the steps in too much of a hurry to look at
+anybody. He flung his overcoats and another dispatch case into the
+shandrydan, then went round to the box and gravely tested the roping-on
+of the luggage. The pile wobbled so menacingly that he was discouraged,
+left it alone and ran in again. During another interval he must have
+kissed and said good-bye to his mother, perhaps in her room, perhaps on
+the stairs. When they appeared in the doorway all that was visibly over
+between them. She still had a hand on his sleeve but it was a light and
+casual contact of which neither of them seemed aware; she had already
+delivered him up to futurity. Those who had felt constrained to draw
+back from the scene of a parting began to return again. Ronald became
+their prey. Appalled by a publicity as of the scaffold, he turned with
+some desperately trumped-up remark to his mother, but she was not behind
+him. Apart at the top of the steps, bareheaded in the afternoon light,
+she was standing, a little fatigued by all this, looking across at the
+hill that rose over the road and the group of young palms at the gate
+that seemed to be also serenely awaiting the exit.
+
+“I say, if Milton doesn’t come soon we shall run it fine,” called Ronald
+in an unnaturally loud voice. Another woman would have jumped at this
+excuse to hurry back into the Hotel agitatedly calling, anything rather
+than stand there, just stand there. But Mrs. Kerr stood there, and
+women’s hearts hardened. “Oh no, Ronald,” she said, “you have plenty of
+time.”
+
+Ronald, braced up with his back to the shandrydan, frowned up the steps
+to search out the interior gloom. A moment, his face lightened; Milton
+must be coming. Milton _was_ coming, he was half way down the steps with
+his hat off, bowing and smiling to left and right, and Ronald was half
+way into the shandrydan. Then a voice—Mrs. Bellamy’s—called “Mr.
+Milton!” and Milton turned back. It was strange, almost eerie to hear
+Mrs. Bellamy’s voice because she and Sydney had managed somehow to
+create an impression of having already departed. Since lunch-time when
+they had said their good-byes they must have been up in their rooms. It
+was recalled with a shock that they were not to set out on their shorter
+journey up the coast till just before tea-time. Yet Tessa had been
+already translated, she was an amiable ghost and her cousin a
+hard-sounding name with a cold-sounding echo. It was as though Milton
+running back up the steps with his same formal smile were going back
+into the shades.
+
+The shades came to meet him not far inside the door. Tessa was
+breathless “—Were so worried!” she said—“_couldn’t_ find you this
+morning.” She shook his hand between both of hers with more little
+broken-off sentences. “Do so hope ... did so wish ... shall
+remember....”
+
+Sydney, looking unnatural and urban in a dark-coloured travelling dress,
+stepped out from behind her. “Well, good-bye,” she said, and she and
+Milton shook hands awkwardly. “Well, good-bye,” said he, and after a
+moment’s hesitation as though he did not like to seem too abrupt ran
+down the steps and got into the shandrydan. She came a little way after
+him and stood with a hand on the concierge’s desk from which she picked
+up an envelope and confusedly read the address, then looked after him
+again. Her manner was strained and unwomanly; the impulse that had
+brought her down here (it could not have been Tessa’s) had been highly
+unnatural. She did not wait to watch the departure but turned and went
+upstairs again slowly, followed by Tessa.
+
+Milton and Ronald looked up at the windows of the Hotel vacantly;
+everybody looked at each other, everybody waited. At last the driver
+climbed on to the box, at last he gathered up the reins. Milton and
+Ronald sitting up stiffly side by side, their legs, willy-nilly entwined
+in the limited scope of the shandrydan, entangled in rugs and overcoats,
+relaxed, were bumped violently backward as the carriage moved on, let
+broad smiles break over their faces. Their friends who had been drawing
+deep breaths for this moment released an enormous “_Good_-by-ye!” A
+hundred jocularities there had not yet been mood or occasion for were
+launched off bravely after the never-returning couple. One could tell
+them anything now, before it was too late, their memories were from
+henceforward a limbo. The voices went up to the sky, together or
+isolated. Ronald’s mother stood smiling and waving her hand, all round
+her the handkerchiefs fluttered.... “_Dear_ old Ronald.... Steady,
+Ronald.... _Sure_ you know where you’re going, Ronald?” ... and at the
+height of all this “Cheer up, Milton!”
+
+Someone flung a bunch of flowers at Ronald and it struck Milton on the
+side of the head and dropped just under the wheel; the stalks were
+crushed and a slimy smear appeared on the wheel and came round faster
+and faster and faster as the driver took the gravel sweep magnificently
+and turned off out the gate. Cordelia Barry rushed out, picked up the
+flowers and flung them again; but this time they fell quite short and
+everybody laughed.
+
+Milton and Ronald, avoiding one another’s eye, leant over the back of
+the carriage waving their hats and shouting jocular nothings. The driver
+cracked his whip, the rattling wheels fled faster and soon the
+travellers, still waving and with big mouths open inaudibly, had
+disappeared. The little company on the steps sighed in immense
+desolation.
+
+Before the sigh had come to an end, Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym had
+detached themselves and, complete with their red parasols and swinging
+baskets, hurried away. If they were still to make anything of the
+afternoon not a moment more must be wasted. They were well down the road
+under the chestnut-trees coming out into leaf before Miss Pym observed
+rather breathlessly: “Strange how they still go on touching one.”
+
+“Strange—so profoundly.”
+
+“These goings away.” She sighed over a diminishing vista of hundreds.
+“Even when they’re simply spectacular, not at all _partings_.... Emily,
+did you _say_ anything?” She added quickly, to hint that the answer
+should be in the negative, “I didn’t feel that one _could_....”
+
+“I must confess that I did. My wretched impulsiveness,” said Miss
+Fitzgerald and put on that rather annoying expression of
+self-deprecation.
+
+“Impulsiveness ... oh,” said Miss Pym and smiled a discreet shade of
+pity.
+
+“I suppose one must face one’s heredity. All the Fitzgeralds——”
+
+“I know,” said Miss Pym rather sharply. They had begun to climb the
+hill, the sun was full on them and Miss Pym, pricking all over with her
+own particularly uncomfortable kind of heat that went in instead of
+coming out, was anxious not to hear about the Fitzgeralds. She was
+anxious that Emily should not begin to rehearse those unfortunate (but
+striking) examples of Fitzgerald impulsiveness back through the ages. An
+inclination to do this was Emily’s weakness, and it was always when
+disappointment, anxiety or lassitude should have drawn them together
+that they had to be most aware of one another’s weaknesses. They had
+faced this out and discussed it with one another simply and frankly. It
+was wonderful to have somebody, always there, with whom one could
+discuss the most difficult phases of one’s relationship (afterwards)
+simply and frankly. Whoever might come or might go, there would always
+be that. Friendship is such a wonderful basis in Life—or _has_ such a
+wonderful basis in Life; either, she thought was true. Miss Pym thought
+of her friend Emily with tenderness but wished that she would not pant
+in this exaggerated way to show that she was being hurried too fast up
+the hill. If she was being hurried too fast up the hill why couldn’t she
+say so? “If we’re going too fast I expect you to tell me,” she said at
+last in a controlled voice.
+
+“I thought we must be doing this for a bet,” said Miss Fitzgerald and
+panted mirthfully.
+
+“Who did you think I had betted?”
+
+“Isn’t it: ‘had bet’?”
+
+They were both silent and went up more slowly, wondering what they would
+find to discuss when (quite soon now) they came to the top. The terrace
+for which they were making had been the scene of profound discussions;
+there must be something about it, about the tilt of the ground or the
+way the trees grew. It had not for some time been revisited, in fact
+they only seemed to have remembered about it to-day. Miss Pym now
+thought that as they both sat down with their faces towards the cool air
+and their backs against olive-trees she would begin, “Life itself, I
+think, is very wonderful....” But for this, she could not help asking,
+would she find Emily _absolutely_ in tune?... When at last they had
+really arrived, had shut their umbrellas and flung down those baskets,
+Miss Pym was surprised, however, to feel “_Poor_ Mr. Milton!” torn out
+of her.
+
+Miss Fitzgerald stopped panting and cried, “Yes, I _know_.”
+
+“The Lee-Mittisons, among others, are so sorry. You know they are
+getting up Progressive Games?”
+
+“I know,” said Miss Fitzgerald again and stared out to sea rather
+absently, rather exclusively as one who could not bring Progressive
+Games or people who talked about them into focus.
+
+This was not fair of her. “Not that I see any reason why they should
+have made use of _him_,” Miss Pym said indignantly.
+
+“Surely he was capable of looking after himself?” said Emily, still with
+the distant manner she wore when anyone “talked about men.” Miss Pym did
+not believe that he _was_, or that Emily _believed_ he was, but she said
+in a cold voice, “Obviously.” The word “obviously” has always a pained
+and painful sound when used between people who know each other too well.
+They both listened to it with fear and foreboding and yet felt incapable
+of making an overture. They wished that they had not come back to the
+terrace, which under some subtle influence seemed to have changed.
+
+Then an instinct, a touch of genius made Emily turn her head and say,
+“Eleanor, do you remember the day when we—so nearly lost one another?”
+
+Eleanor remembered walking down that road with Mrs. Kerr, and the
+horrible macaroni they had given her for lunch....
+
+“Emily....”
+
+The Hotel from up here was as small as a doll’s-house; shoulder to
+shoulder they sat and looked down on it. Hand in hand, reunited, in
+perfect security they sat and remembered that day.
+
+
+
+
+                          Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+The original spelling was mostly preserved. Obvious typographical errors
+were silently corrected. The use of hyphenation and ellipses was
+carefully normalized. All other changes are shown here (before/after):
+
+   [p. 17]:
+   ... sitting far back in the shadow. At one’s feet a parked ...
+   ... sitting far back in the shadow. At one’s feet a packed ...
+
+   [p. 37]:
+   ... the assault of noonday behind impassible jalousies. No ...
+   ... the assault of noonday behind impassable jalousies. No ...
+
+   [p. 133]:
+   ... “Oh!” said he, and looking down at their two pair ...
+   ... “Oh!” said he, and looking down at their two pairs ...
+
+   [p. 156]:
+   ... past, preceptions so delicate, appreciations so faultless ...
+   ... past, perceptions so delicate, appreciations so faultless ...
+
+   [p. 156]:
+   ... “As a matter of fact,” said Roland gravely, “I don’t ...
+   ... “As a matter of fact,” said Ronald gravely, “I don’t ...
+
+   [p. 170]:
+   ... course, from having nothing else to do here. Oh, don’t
+       don’t ...
+   ... course, from having nothing else to do here. Oh, don’t ...
+
+   [p. 192]:
+   ... never had said anything if you hadn’t shown your teeth ...
+   ... never have said anything if you hadn’t shown your teeth ...
+
+   [p. 251]:
+   ... “Extraordinary idea!” he exclaimed and threw up up ...
+   ... “Extraordinary idea!” he exclaimed and threw up ...
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79006 ***