“Would you like to know,” she asked, “what I’d really like for lunch?” Winn said he would awfully, and by the time she had told him they had reached the top, and the funicular appeared, disgorging people in front of a big glass-covered restaurant.
Winn found the best and quietest table with the finest view. From it they could see the valley down to Frauenkirch and up to Clavedel.
It was a splendid lunch, curiously good, with sparkling sweet wine, which Claire loved, and Winn, secretly loathing, serenely shared because of a silly feeling he had that he must take what she did.
After lunch they sat and smoked, leaning over the great clear view. They could hear the distant velvety boom of the village clock beneath them. Winn gripped his hand firmly on the table.
“I’ve got to damned well do it,” he said to himself. He remembered that he had had once to shoot a spy in cold blood, and that he used those words to himself before he did it.
A couple passed close to their table. The woman was over-dressed, and hung with all kinds of jingling chains and bangles; she was pretty, and as she sat with her profile turned a little toward them she was curiously like Estelle. This was his opportunity. It must come now; all the morning it had lain in the back of his mind, behind delight, behind their laughter, like some lurking jungle creature waiting for the dark.
“Do you see that woman,” he asked Claire, “the pretty one over there by the pillar? She’s awfully like — ”
Claire stopped him. “Pretty!” she cried. “Do you really think she’s pretty? I think she’s simply loathsome!”
Winn checked himself hurriedly; he obviously couldn’t finish his sentence with “she’s awfully like my wife.”
“Well, she sets out to be pretty, doesn’t she?” he altered it rather lamely. Claire continued extremely scornful.