“I laugh for pure happiness,” she said, “and—and oh, Claude, it’s the real me who is with you now. Do you understand? I expect not, so I will explain. There are several me’s; you rather liked No. 1, which was the chattering and extremely amusing me; that was the one you saw first, and you did like her. Then—oh, well, the other me’s are all varieties of that, and right below them all is the real me. It doesn’t know sometimes whether it wants to laugh or cry or to talk or be silent; it only wants—— Oh, it’s like you with Bach and supper about equal. Laughing and crying don’t particularly matter if there is you, just as to you Bach and supper didn’t matter if there was me. And there is. It’s me, as the children say. And you and I make us. It comes in the grammars. I only wanted to tell you that. And now we’ll instantly talk about something else.”
Claude stopped, and against the faint luminance of the sky she saw his chin protrude itself.
“I don’t see any reason for doing that,” he said. “It’s much the most interesting thing——”
“I know.”
He drew her toward him.
“Well, you might give a fellow a kiss,” he said.
CHAPTER IV.
THE morning delicacy to which Lady Austell was so subject was due to the fact that when staying in other people’s houses she found she saw enough of her hosts and fellow-guests if she denied herself the pleasure of their company at breakfast. In all other respects, she was stronger than most horses, and could go through programmes which would have prostrated all but the most robust without any feeling of unpleasant fatigue, provided only that the programmes interested or amused her or in any way furthered her plans. But she really became tired the moment she was bored, and since sitting at breakfast with ten or twelve cheerful people, with the crude morning sunlight perhaps pouring in at a window directly opposite her, bored her very much, she chose the wiser plan of not joining in those public festivities. But with her excellent tact she knew that at a house like Mrs. Osborne’s everybody was expected to come down, to be in admirable spirits and to eat a great deal of solid food, and so she explained to Mrs. Osborne that she never ate any breakfast. Hence it was that about half-past nine next morning her maid carried upstairs a tray groaning with coffee, hot milk, toast, just one poached egg, and a delicious plate of fruit. Mrs. Osborne had given her a very pleasant sitting room next her bedroom, furnished with Messrs. Linkwater’s No. 1 white boudoir suite, for, like half the house, it had been practically unfurnished; and Austell who had ascertained those comfortable facts when he bade his mother good-night the evening before, caused this particular groaning tray to be brought here also and paddled in to join her in carpet slippers and a dressing gown.
“I call this a devilish comfortable house nowadays,” he observed, “which is far more than could be said for it in our time. What a pity the Osbornes and we can’t run it together. They would pay the bills, and we could give tone. I wish it was possible to be comfortable, though poor. But it isn’t. Everything comfortable costs so much. Now, darling mother, let loose, and tell me what you think of it all. Really your—your absence of breakfast looks quite delicious. They have given me chops and beef and things. May I have a piece of your melon?”
Jim and his mother were rather fond of each other, but they seldom met without having a quarrel, for while both were agreed in the general plan of grabbing at whatever of this world’s goods could be appropriated, each despised and, in private, exposed the methods of the other. He, so his mother was afraid, was one of the very few people who was not afraid of her, and she often wished he was. He had lit a cigarette after the bath, and was standing in front of the fireplace, on the thick, white sheepskin rug, smoking the end of it.