"Let me tell you when I come back. Yes ... together we might do so much...."
"When you come back ..." he said, and pressed her hand in understanding.
Then Diana stepped out of the brightness of the drawing-room.
"How can you two stay sleepily there, looking at the stars like two cats, when I am trying to lure you indoors with the latest comic-opera music! Meinheer van Hert, Mister Pym says, will you drink with him?..."
VI
THE JOURNEY
As he had three ladies with him Mr. Pym decided to take a private saloon-car, but no saloon in the world could prevent them being nearly smothered with the dust through Bechuanaland and Matabeleland in August, and while Aunt Emily rent the air with her complainings and sufferings, Diana chose to pass disparaging remarks upon the long-suffering British Empire, which she considered responsible for her journey north. Meryl said nothing, but there was often a wistful expression in her eyes as they sighted a lonely farmstead, or stood in a little wayside station with perhaps one corrugated-iron building, where some white-faced woman looked listlessly at the train. When she tried to voice her sympathy with their loneliness, however, Diana snapped her up a little impatiently.
"My dear Meryl, you will look at things always in the sentimental light. A woman with a husband and child in this freshness and sunshine is at least better off than if she were in a city slum, and her man probably out of work, and her child dying for want of fresh air."
"But that is not the only alternative!... And in any case to suffer in company is almost always easier than to suffer alone."