“I love the sense of travel, too, and I got it by going to the Foreign Office. Guatemala has been my après-midi.”
Silvia triumphantly applauded his quickness. She had seen on Mrs. Mainwaring’s face a protest at the invasion of her privacy; but Peter had done more than merely see it, he had slammed the door again with allusions to himself and Guatemala. That, somehow, a perception as quick as intuition, seemed to her extraordinarily characteristic of him. There was no stumbling, no hesitation, where she would have drawn attention to a similar mistake by a bungling silence. His mind was like the hair on his neck—abrupt and crisp.
The ball was with Peter again.
“I nearly fell asleep over Guatemala,” he said. “Surely Guatemala is very remote; there are many things more immediately interesting. Nellie’s wedding, by the way. It’s less than a week ahead, and every young man I know is buying new pocket-handkerchiefs to weep into. I’ve bought an extremely large one. There’ll be room for you to cry into one half of it, Miss Silvia, while I cry into the other. They promised to send it round on a hand trolley, like a sack of coals.”
Silvia laughed.
“Ah, I shall want some of that handkerchief,” she said, “but not to cry into, only to wave. She is going to be tremendously happy, isn’t she? What’s he like? I hardly know him.”
Peter considered this.
“He’s like—he’s like a very tidy room,” he said. “Solid furniture and not a speck of dust.”
“And the person who sits in it?” asked the girl.
“Nobody sits in it. At least I never found anyone there. Philip is the room. There’s The Times warmed and folded; there’s letter-paper, big and little, and envelopes, big and little. Perhaps Nellie has found someone there. Philip may get under the sofa when anybody else comes in.”