“Perhaps those words were, for me, the dawn of love. Perhaps—who knows....”
“But what happened?” goggled Winnie.
“The landlord came in with the watering-pot,” Deb snubbed her, brutally. “And we all played French rounders together.”
“Memoirs of a Courtesan, by Lewis Carroll. Deb, I don’t think Winnie can stand many more dawns.”
“Olaf was romantic. Olaf was fair and blue-eyed and white of skin, and just twenty; and he came from the northern forests of Sweden. Nothing was too stock sentimental for him.... When I set out to gather roses in a basket from my garden before breakfast, he followed me about saying how beautiful it was to see me gather roses in a basket from my garden before breakfast.... He dreamt of a day when he should be standing in the doorway of his hut among the snow, carelessly rubbing up his ski and shielding his eyes from the Aurora Borealis, and I, a weary little dark-haired princess dressed all in white——”
“That shift might come in useful again.”
“—Would come plodding towards him through the storm like—like a weary little dark-haired princess. Then I told him what I really looked like in really cold weather.... And so his dawn of love was shattered in the bud——”
Antonia groaned at the metaphor. And Deb, who was getting tired, even of the expression in Winifred’s eyes, grew ever briefer and more inconsequent in her memoirs.
“Tremayne said quickly: ‘You can trust me, Deb—You needn’t be afraid....’ And then looked like a sulky steamroller when I cried back, ‘I’m not afraid ... I’m hurt!’—And I told him he ought to take a few lessons in comparative anatomy—and then he sulked again. What is comparative anatomy, Jill? Would it mean comparing one girl with another, in his case? Anyhow he’s not as deft as that dear old coachman who was sixty-four and wanted me to come out with him to Canada and make a fresh start with him there. But he’d always driven the Brighton coaches, so I was sure he’d feel the change and I wouldn’t be able to make up to him for it.... He was just a year younger than Grandfather Mackenzie, whom I’d always snuggled up to and curled my little hand confidingly in his big shaggy paw. That was before I learnt that sixty-four was no age at all, though his wife had looked at me queerly once or twice ... and when I met Etienne Dalison at their garden-party, and grandfather said: ‘Is he your fairy prince?’ I laughed saucily up at his whiskers: ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I want you all to myself,’ and jumped at me—Lord! how I ran!
“Etienne Dalison was the velvet hand inside the iron glove—and he never forgot it. ‘Certainly you may go,’ with a sort of deadly quiet. That was in his house at midnight—or it might have been a quarter to eleven. ‘Is it likely I would detain you?’ And courteously and quietly he helped me on with my cloak the instant I requested it. That was his quiet courtesy....