Of course the hotel didn’t approve of her; no hotel could be expected to approve of a situation which it so much enjoyed. Besides Claire was lawless; she kept her own rules, but she broke everybody else’s. She never sought a chaperon or accepted some older woman’s sheltering presence; she never sat in the ladies’ salon or went to tea with the chaplain’s wife. On one dreadful occasion she tobogganed wilfully on a Sunday, under the chaplain’s nose, with a man who had arrived only the night before.
When old Mrs. Stewart, who knitted regularly by the winter and counted almost as many scandals as stitches, took her up on the subject out of kindness of heart, Claire had said without meaning to be rude:
“I really don’t think the chaplain’s nose ought to be there, to be under, do you?”
Of course, Mrs. Stewart did. She had the highest respect for the chaplain’s nose; but it wasn’t the kind of subject you could argue about.
For a long time Claire and Winn never really talked; she threw words at him over her shoulder or in the hall or when he put her skates on or took them off at the rink. He seemed to get there quicker than any one else, though the operation itself was sometimes a little prolonged. Of course there were meals, but meals belonged to Maurice, and Claire had a way of always slipping behind him, so that it was really over the skates that Winn discovered how awfully clever she was.
She read books, deep books; why, even Hall Caine and Marie Corelli didn’t satisfy her, and Winn had always thought those famous authors the last words in modern literature. He now learned others. She gave him Conrad to read, and Meredith. He got stuck in Meredith, but he liked Conrad; it made him smell the mud and feel again the silence of the jungle.
“Funny,” he explained to Claire, “because when you come to think of it, he doesn’t actually write about the smell; only he’s got it, and the jungle feeling, too. It’s quiet, you know, in there, but not a bit like the snows out here; there’s nothing doing up in this snow, but God alone knows what’s happening in the jungle. Odd how there can be two sorts of quiet, ain’t it?”
“There can be two sorts of anything,” said Claire, exultantly. “Oh, not only two — dozens; that’s why it’s all such fun.”
But Winn was inclined to think that there might be more fun where there were fewer candidates for it. There was, for instance, Mr. Roper. Maurice was trying to work up for his final examination at Sandhurst with Mr. Roper. He was a black-haired, polite man with a constant smile and a habit of agreeing with people much too promptly; also he read books and talked to Claire about them in the evening till every one started bridge. Fortunately, that shut him up.
Winn was considered in Anglo-Indian clubs, where the standard of bridge is high, to play considerably above it, and Claire played with a relish, that was more instinctive than reliable; nevertheless, Winn loved playing with her, and accepted Mr. Roper and Maurice as one accepts severity of climate on the way to a treat. He knew he must keep his temper with them both, so when he wanted to be nasty he looked at Claire, and when Claire looked at him he wanted to be nice. He couldn’t, of course, stop Claire from ever in any circumstances glancing in the direction of Mr. Roper, and it would have startled him extremely if he had discovered that Claire, seeing how much he disliked it, had reduced this form of communion to the rarest civility; because Winn still took for granted the fact that Claire noticed nothing.