§ 2
Punctually at nine o’clock next morning, Peter arrived.
Looking at him through the dining-room window, as he stood paying the taxi, as he walked—carrying his heavy leather dressing-bag easily as though it had been a dispatch-case—up the steps, he seemed to Patricia, above all things, an adequate person. The long, blue, belted Chesterfield over-coat—fur-lined but not fur-collared; the gray squash hat; brown gloves; ribbed socks; brown, carefully-polished brogue shoes; all betokened, in her eyes, efficiency. And when, after the usual greeting to Smith—(“Mrs. Jameson in the dining-room? Right. Just take this coat of mine, will you? And you might unpack for me at once”)—he came into the room, the impression deepened.
The cheek she kissed was newly shaven; the dark hair smooth-brushed; the moustache clipped soldier-fashion. He had—an invariable habit—taken his bath on the boat; arrived spick and span, ready for the day’s work. The gray eyes were clear, healthy: unusually merry, she thought.
“Breakfast?” she asked, after he had returned her kiss. “It’s quite ready.”
“Rather. Eggs and bacon for choice. Something English after all that German tripe.”
“Peter, your language is really getting atrocious.”
“Sorry, old thing. But honestly, Hamburg is the limit. I haven’t averaged four hours’ sleep all this week. What’s happened to the town in the last six years—I don’t know. They’re all crazy, I think. What with old Beckmann’s lobsters and young Beckmann’s dressed crabs. . . .”
He relapsed into silence; seeing again the champagne dinners at Forti’s, the red-wine lunches at the Rathaus, the smoky, tinselled Tanz-klubs, the whole nauseous pageant of heavy-handed vice and tawdry luxury with which the commercial classes of Germany were trying to ape the natural gaiety of France.
“Still, I got what I went for,” he added, as Smith brought in the Sheffield-plate breakfast-dishes, the big silver tea-pot.