“I’ve only just come,” he said. “Had a puncture. How are you, Violet?”
“All right. But how late you are! We’re all late, in fact. We must go and dress.”
Raymond looked up and down Colin’s bath-towel, and his face darkened again. But he made a call on his cordiality.
“Hullo, Colin,” he said. “Been bathing? Jolly in the water, I should think.”
“Very jolly,” said Colin. “How long are you down for?”
He had not meant any particular provocation in the question, though he was perfectly careless as to whether Raymond found it there or not. He did, and his face flushed.
“Well, to be quite candid,” he said, “I’m down here for as long as I please. With your permission, of course.”
“How jolly!” said Colin in a perfectly smooth voice, which he knew exasperated his brother. “Come on, Vi, it’s time to dress.”
“Oh, there’s twenty minutes yet,” said Raymond. “Come for a few minutes’ stroll, Vi.”
Colin paused for her answer, slightly smiling, and looking just above Raymond’s head. The two always quarrelled whenever they met, though perhaps “quarrel” is both too strong and too superficial a word to connote the smouldering enmity which existed between them, and which the presence of the other was sufficient to wreathe with little flapping flames. Envy, as black as hell and as deep as the sea, existed between them, and there was no breath too light to blow it into incandescence. Raymond envied Colin for absolutely all that Colin was, for his skin and his slimness, his eyes and his hair, and to a degree unutterably greater, for the winning smile, the light, ingratiating manner that he himself so miserably lacked, even for a certain brusque heedlessness on Colin’s part which was interpreted, in his case, into the mere unselfconsciousness of youth. In the desire to please others, Raymond held himself to be at least the equal of his brother, yet, where his efforts earned for him but a tepid respect, Colin would weave an enchantment. If Raymond made some humorous contribution to the conversation, glazed eyes and perfunctory comment would be all his wages, whereas if Colin, eager and careless, had made precisely the same offering, he would have been awarded attention and laughter.