“You’ve lost a trunk? Let me see if I can find it.”
It pleased him that she did not return the conventional “Oh, would you?” Instead, she corrected him with a laugh—“Not a trunk, but my trunk; I’ve no other—” and then added briskly: “You’d better first see to getting your own things on the boat.”
This made him answer, as if to give substance to his plans by discussing them: “I don’t actually know that I’m going over.”
“Not going over?”
“Well ... perhaps not by this boat.” Again he felt a stealing indecision. “I may probably have to go back to London. I’m—I’m waiting ... expecting a letter...(She’ll think me a defaulter,” he reflected.) “But meanwhile there’s plenty of time to find your trunk.”
He picked up his companion’s bundles, and offered her an arm which enabled her to press her slight person more closely under his umbrella; and as, thus linked, they beat their way back to the platform, pulled together and apart like marionettes on the wires of the wind, he continued to wonder where he could have seen her. He had immediately classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been brightly but lightly washed in with water-colour, all confirmed the evidence of her high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures. She was clearly an American, but with the loose native quality strained through a closer woof of manners: the composite product of an enquiring and adaptable race. All this, however, did not help him to fit a name to her, for just such instances were perpetually pouring through the London Embassy, and the etched and angular American was becoming rarer than the fluid type.
More puzzling than the fact of his being unable to identify her was the persistent sense connecting her with something uncomfortable and distasteful. So pleasant a vision as that gleaming up at him between wet brown hair and wet brown boa should have evoked only associations as pleasing; but each effort to fit her image into his past resulted in the same memories of boredom and a vague discomfort...
II
“Don’t you remember me now—at Mrs. Murrett’s?” She threw the question at Darrow across a table of the quiet coffee-room to which, after a vainly prolonged quest for her trunk, he had suggested taking her for a cup of tea.