Violet’s eyes wandered away from him a moment, and mused alone.
“I believe that at the bottom of my heart I should rejoice that you were in love with anybody,” she said.
Colin’s beautiful mouth curled with derision.
“God! That’s the last word in wifely devotion,” he said.
“But it’s true,” said she.
Ronald and his wife had decided not to alter their plans, but to stay till Monday, and thus Pamela’s arrival left the party numerically as they were. But her presence brought into it some sort of emotional intensity; flippant as was her speech, Violet divined a certain force behind the flippancy, below her wit there was will. Certainly she was extremely good-looking, black of eye and hair, olive in skin, a wonderful contrast to the fairness of Staniers. And flippancy and force alike, wit and will, were all shooting at one target....
“London is getting addled,” she was saying. “It always does half-way through July. The hens, that is the hostesses, sit and sit and sit, but nothing comes out, except a few engagements of their sons and their daughters, or rather of their fathers and their mothers. That would be nearer the truth. There was a summary of the ages of newly-married people in The Times the other day. There were six over seventy, three over eighty, and one of ninety-two.”
“Deaths, surely, deaths,” said Ronald. Pamela had been making him feel young: he was glad he had settled to stop till Monday.
“No, dear Mr. Stanier, marriages,” she said. “The people who died were much younger, I noticed it particularly. How do you explain that, Colin?”
“That marriage keeps you young is the only explanation,” said he.