“Chris and Wilfred don’t get on together as we do,” Meeta said in a low voice. “They’re sillies.”
“He’s like all the men,” said Meeta, “’Sept one perhaps. Want everything they do and give nothing.
“He won’t even say they’re engaged,” she said. “Dodged seeing her father.”
There was a pause for reflection and then a renewal of endearments.
“I’m gorne on you,” said Meeta. “I am fair gorne on you. You’ve got the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. China blue they are.”
§ 4
So detachedly it was that Mr. Preemby and his future wife passed their first afternoon together. He remembered it, as he remembered most actual things, indistinctly, in a setting of hot sand and sunshine, blue-grey grass and a line of poppies nodding against an intense blue sky. And then across these opening memories Chris Hossett seemed to leap at him with flushed cheeks and glowing eyes, magnified by her glasses.
Two or three days intervened before that passionate pounce. Mr. Preemby, in his character of an incidental visitor to Sheringham, was under no obligation to produce a social background, but Miss Pinkey introduced him to two large, kindly aunts of a sedentary sort, as a young man related to Miss Hossett who had saved her from a nasty fall off a bicycle, and he and she both went to tea with Chris Hossett’s “people.” Old Mr. Hossett was a very ailing man, excessively fat and irritable; he had never been the same, whatever the same was, after his only son had died; and Mrs. Hossett, an energetic lean threat of what her daughter might become, had to wait on Mr. Hossett hand and foot. She had spectacles instead of Chris’s glasses, her eyes were careworn and her complexion was leaden and her neck lean. There were also a married cousin and his wife, a Mr. and Mrs. Widgery, who seemed to be under the impression that Mr. Preemby was a relation of Miss Pinkey’s. Mr. Widgery had a long pock-marked face and the dullest brown eyes Mr. Preemby had ever seen. There was nothing difficult to eat at tea and Mr. Preemby got on very well listening to an explanation of the precariousness of Mr. Hossett’s existence, due to heart trouble, from Mrs. Hossett and of just how unsatisfactory and distressing it was to come away and leave the laundry in the hands of a manager. Wilfred did not come to the tea. He had been asked but he did not come.
The next day Mr. Preemby met Wilfred on the sea front watching the girls bathing from a bathing machine. Afterwards all four went for a walk in search of privacy, and it became evident that Miss Hossett declined to Spoon further with Wilfred. It was evident that there was profound trouble between Chris and Wilfred. They scarcely spoke as they returned towards the town; and before the sea front was reached Wilfred said “So long” quite suddenly, and turned away and vanished up a road running inland. Thereupon Wilfred passed out of Mr. Preemby’s world; Mr. Preemby never knew what became of him and never wanted to know; and the next day he became aware for the first time of Miss Hossett’s magnified eyes, regarding him with an interest and a challenge that made him feel almost uncomfortable.
Miss Hossett became a serious obstacle to the Spooning of Meeta. The quartette was now reduced to a trio; and Mr. Preemby found himself the apex, so to speak, of a triangle, the eternal triangle in an exceptionally acute form. Whenever Meeta was on the one hand, Chris was on the other. She called him “Our Teddy”; she pressed upon him; she went so far as to stroke his hair. Meeta’s endearments faded to some extent in the presence of this competition, but she made no explicit objection.