The maid who had opened the door for them said, “Mrs. Farwell would like you to go through into the garden. She is under the elm.”
The terrace, as they came to it, was merely an unroofed continuation of the floor of the great hall. It ended with wide slabs of flower-rimmed stone shelving down into grassy sweeps of hot June color. Off at one side, in a distant corner of the lawn, some Chinese garden chairs were grouped around a rustic table in the shade of a perfect wineglass elm. A little beyond, in the same shade, a woman in a white dress lay stretched in a long chair, her back to the house. A big garden hat, brilliant orange, was tossed on the grass beside her.
But Mrs. Farwell was not asleep, for she heard their voices, and jumping up, came several steps out beyond the shade in her eagerness to welcome them.
“Petra and I were to play tennis. She was to have joined me here—oh—ages ago—and she hasn’t, and I’ve just stayed on waiting all afternoon, and never dreamed it was tea time. Look at me!”—Mrs. Farwell meant apology for her crumpled, sleeveless frock, for her ankle socks on suntanned bare legs, for rather shabby sneakers. “I meant to change, of course. But the afternoon is a dream and I have been dreaming with it, since Petra never came. The child must not forget her tea date, though, and I don’t think she will. She remembered you perfectly, Doctor Pryne, and seemed actually pleased that you were coming.—Yes, Richard! Petra showed pleasure. Doesn’t that sound propitious?”
She stood for another minute out in the glare where she had met her guests, looking hopefully toward the house, as if half expecting Petra’s arrival to coincide with theirs. “Lowell too!” she murmured. “My husband was terribly pleased you were coming, Doctor Pryne. But time doesn’t exist for him when he is working. He will be sure to turn up, though. He has no intention of missing you—this time.”
Then she shaded her brow with her palm and, turning suddenly to Dick, smiled deliberately and sweetly into his eyes. Lewis wished he had been looking somewhere else when this happened. She led them back to the chairs and herself took the one nearest the tea table.
His hostess was not nearly so pretty as Lewis remembered her. But she was much more than pretty! Yes—sitting upright against the fantastic high back of the Chinese chair, in her sleeveless white frock, her hair black as the lacquer of the wickerwork, her very long, curving lashes black, tipped in gold, and dimples subtly hinted in her thin cheeks—she was vital and engaging.
But specious!—Lewis quickly added. Before, when he had thought her rather beautiful and certainly naïvely ingenuous, he had been looking at her through the beginning of twilight in a city apartment. But this second time her background was an elm and the light was of broad day. That changed things somewhat. Lewis did not particularly enjoy his present skepticism. But he could not help himself. And his next unhallowed thought was “Poor Dick!” For the latest Mrs. Farwell’s particular variety of predatoriness was of the sort that relishes a spiritual flavor to its meat; so Lewis, at any rate, hazarded. The bodies, even the hearts of men, would not be enough: Clare Farwell would demand the soul before all.
“Pretty selfish of Petra to waste your afternoon for you like this!” Dick exclaimed. He turned to Lewis. “You can see for yourself how it is. You’ve run right onto it, first thing, without our showing you. It’s always like this. This is the way Petra treats Clare.”
“Oh, Richard! Please! How horrid that sounds. It’s a little unjust as well. This time I am almost certain she really and genuinely forgot I was waiting for her. Her offering to play with me at all was generous. Petra is a hum-dinger at tennis, Doctor Pryne, and I am only fairish. So it’s not much fun for her, playing with me. This is probably the truth of it: Petra wanted to be nice, then her subconscious mind got busy making her forget and so saved her from having to be nice. Doctor Pryne will tell you, Richard, that the hardest things not to forget are the duties which bore us.” She was laughing but in spite of that she meant them to believe her serious.