“I knew it! They’re all a pack of vagabonds. And I hoped you’d be punctual,” he continued, letting himself down into an armchair as if he were lowering a bale of goods over the side of a ship. “After all, you and I belong to the punctual generation.”
She winced a little at being so definitely relegated to the rank where she belonged. Yes: he and she were nearly of an age. She remembered, in her newly-married precocity, thinking of him as a shy shambling boy, years younger than herself. Now he had the deliberate movements of the elderly, and though he shot, fished, played golf, and kept up the activities common to his age, his mind, in maturing, had grown heavier, and seemed to have communicated its prudent motions to his body. She shut her eyes for a second from the vision. Her own body still seemed so supple, free and imponderable. If it had not been for her looking-glass she would never have known she was more than twenty.
She glanced up at the clock; a quarter to eight. Very likely Anne would not be back for another half hour. How would the evening ever drag itself to an end?
They exchanged a few words about the wedding, but the topic was intolerable to Mrs. Clephane. She had managed to face the situation as a whole: to consider its details was still beyond her. Yet if she left that subject, just beyond it lay the question her companion was waiting to ask; and that alternative was intolerable too. She got up from her seat, moved aimlessly across the room, straightened a flower in a vase, put out a superfluous wall-light.
“That’s enough illumination—at our age,” she said, coming back to her seat.
“Oh—you!” He threw all his unspoken worship into the word. “With that hair of yours....”
“My hair—my hair!” Her hands went up to the rich mass as if she would have liked to tear it from her head. At that moment she hated it, as she did everything else that mocked her with the barren illusion of youth.
Fred Landers had coloured to the edge of his own thin hair; no doubt he was afraid of her resenting even this expression of admiration. His embarrassment irritated yet touched her, and raising her eyes she looked into his.
“I never knew till the other day that it’s to you I owe the fact of being here,” she said.
He was evidently unprepared for this, and did not know whether to be distressed or gratified. His faint blush turned to crimson.