Claire and I are not lively people, but we both wanted to make Christopher enjoy himself, although I think Claire resented his Philistine forms of enjoyment a good deal.
Both he and Captain Patch went often to play tennis with the Kendals at Dheera Dhoon.
“He couldn’t, surely,” Claire said to me, desperately, upon this subject.
I know what she meant. Christopher’s possible—or, more probably, impossible—marriage, was always one of Claire’s deepest preoccupations. And she has always been victim to an intensive system under which her hopes and her fears alike leap to gigantic proportions within a few seconds of their conception.
I had no doubt that she had already endowed Christopher and one of the Kendals—probably Dolly, the one she dislikes the most—with a family of which all the members would have inherited the Kendal temperament, which Claire finds a singularly unattractive one.
“I don’t think he could,” I assured her.
She gazed at me out of her enormous, tragical eyes.
“I am living upon the edge of a volcano, Miles.” And as, I suppose, my silence appeared to her to be an inadequate rejoinder—as indeed it was—she added, with violent emphasis, the word: “Literally.”
Poor Claire!
The Kendals, than whom no young women in this world have ever been more devoid of a dangerous fascination, continued to exercise their harmless hospitality, and in return, Christopher begged us to let him ask them to the Manor House.