3
The four of them breakfasted together at Henrici’s, and at noon Phyllis was inducted into the magic circle of their mid-day comradeship at the corner table in the little Hungarian restaurant; and that afternoon they took the train for Woods Point—whither Phyllis had to go as it were in disguise, or at least stealthily, for her family must not know that she was spending the night at Clive’s: an ironic precaution, for their relations were still as vexatiously and chastely intellectual as they had been in the earliest days of their clandestine meetings.
In spite of their need of sleep—and fortified by the thought that tomorrow was Sunday and they could sleep as long as they liked—they sat up until all hours, talking. It was like a reunion, and the memory of their first meeting here touched it with romantic suggestion. The promise of comradeship which had been implicit in that first meeting, obscured at the time by the anxieties and discomforts of a tribal ceremonial, had now, after so long an interval, come true. They felt that they had discovered each other, to a new extent, in this new grouping. It is not often that two couples can happily coalesce into that infinitely fluid and various arrangement, a group of four. But it had quite unmistakably and thrillingly happened!