“You sounded so dazzlingly social from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s accounts.” And as she spoke the words she felt herself becoming correspondingly obscurer and littler.
Calamy laughed. “Perhaps I was that sort of imbecile once,” he said. “But now—well, I hope all that’s over now.”
“I pictured you,” Miss Thriplow went on, straining, in spite of her obscurity, to be brilliant, “I pictured you as one of those people in the Sketch—‘walking in the Park with a friend,’ you know; a friend who would turn out at the least to be a duchess or a distinguished novelist. Can you wonder that I was nervous?” She dropped back into the depths of her chair. Poor little thing! But the pearls, though not marine, were still rather an embarrassment.
CHAPTER II
Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she returned, found them on the upper terrace, looking at the view. It was almost the hour of sunset. The town of Vezza at their feet was already eclipsed by the shadow of the great bluff which projected, on the further side of the westernmost of the two valleys, into the plain. But, beyond, the plain was still bright. It lay, stretched out beneath them like a map of itself—the roads marked in white, the pinewoods dark green, the streams as threads of silver, ploughland and meadowland in chequers of emerald and brown, the railway a dark brown line ruled along it. And beyond its furthest fringes of pinewoods and sand, darkly, opaquely blue, the sea. Towards this wide picture, framed between the projecting hills, of which the eastern was still rosily flushed with the light, the western profoundly dark, a great flight of steps descended, past a lower terrace, down, between columnar cypresses, to a grand sculptured gateway half-way down the hill.
They stood there in silence, leaning their elbows on the balustrade. Ever since she had jettisoned the Guardswoman they had got on, Miss Thriplow thought, most awfully well. She could see that he liked her combination of moral ingenuousness and mental sophistication, of cleverness and genuineness. Why she had ever thought of pretending she was anything but simple and natural she couldn’t now imagine. After all, that was what she really was—or at least what she had determined that she ought to be.
From the entrance court on the west flank of the palace came the hoot of a motor horn and the sound of voices.
“There they are,” said Miss Thriplow.
“I rather wish they weren’t,” he said, and sighing he straightened himself up and turned round, with his back to the view, towards the house. “It’s like heaving a great stone into a calm pool—all this noise, I mean.”