And then, as he was looking round, his nose lifted in impatient scorn of George’s post-mortem persistence, and quite prepared to see whisky and cigars, grown dusty, on some table in a corner—why not? they would only be in keeping with all the rest—he caught sight of a little white object on the heavy sofa at right angles to a fireplace in which feebly flickered the minutest of newly lit fires. A bit of her. A trace, at last, of her.
He darted across and pounced on it. Soft, white, sweet with the sweetness he had noticed when he was near her, it was a small fox fur, a thing a woman puts round her neck.
He snatched it up, and held it to his face. How like her, how like her. He was absorbed in it, buried in it, breathing its delicate sweet smell; and Catherine, coming in quietly with her latchkey, saw him like this, over there by the sofa with his back to the door.
She stood quiet in the doorway, watching him with surprised amusement, because it seemed so funny. Really, to have this sort of thing happening to one’s boa at one’s age! Queer young man. Perhaps having all that flaming red hair made one....
But, though he had heard no sound, he was aware of her, and turned round quickly, and caught her look of amusement, and flushed a deep red.
He put the fur carefully down on the sofa again and came over to her. ‘Well, why shouldn’t I?’ he said defiantly, throwing back his head.
She laughed and shook hands and said she was very glad he had come. She was so easy, so easy; taking things so much as a matter of course, things that were so little a matter of course that they made him tremble—things like drying her shoes the night before in the taxi, or feeling on his face the soft white fur. If she would be shy, be self-conscious for even an instant, he thought, he would be more master of himself as well as of her. But she wasn’t. Not a trace of it. Just simple friendliness, as if everything he said and did was usual, was inevitable, was what she quite expected, or else didn’t matter one way or the other. She wasn’t even surprised to see him. Yet he had assured her he never could get away on Saturdays.
‘I couldn’t help coming,’ he said, the flush fixed on his face. ‘You didn’t expect me to wait really till Sunday week, did you?’
‘I’m very glad you didn’t,’ she said, ringing the bell for tea and sitting down at the tea-table and beginning to pull off her gloves.
They stuck because they were wet with the rain she had been out in.