She nodded towards a flotilla of little rowing-boats that stirred lazily to the rhythm of the lazy waves.
“Yes?” inquired her mother, who sat in a low chair looking benevolently at the world that God had made specially for her.
“And though I shall be a little timid at first,” continued Katya, “I shall say yes as soon as he has kissed me passionately on the mouth. But not until. I think he would kiss rather well, don’t you?”
“I think he would be thorough, dear.... But we musn’t talk like this. I never used even to think like it till you came home from Brussels.”
“Would you like Guy for a son-in-law, mamma?”
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Kontorompa was fascinated by Fallon almost as much as her daughter was, and it was with a wholly sensuous feeling that she closed her lids and said:
“Yes, dear, I should—very much.”
“But the kind of kisses he would bestow upon you, mamma, would be very different from those I should get,” said Katya, mischievously.
But though Fallon saw a good deal of the two ladies during the next few days, there was something in his manner that made Mrs. Kontorompa suspect he had no intention of marrying her daughter. He was in love with her—yes; but it was not quite the kind of love that leads to marriage. Rather was it the kind of hot, uneasy passion that persecutes a man until he has gained his desire, when it shrinks and dies like an orchid in a night of frost. But Katya, of course, was extraordinarily clever: ignobly so. She was directing the affair with elaborate carefulness, confident that in the end she would trap this bright tiger of a man in her net of conspiracies.
Though living in the same hotel, Fallon wrote to her twice every day. Sitting up in bed in his yellow pyjamas each night, he wrote just before he slept, and the note was delivered by his valet to Katya’s maid at eight o’clock every morning. And just before dinner in the evening he also wrote, and this letter he himself handed to Katya as they said good night. Fallon knew how to write. He had a habit of intoxicating himself with words, and though each letter said: “I love you! I want you!” he rescued himself from monotony and her from boredom, by saying the same thing in a hundred different ways. But he was never tender, and Mrs. Kontorompa, who eagerly read the letters Katya passed on to her, was driven on one occasion to remark: