§4
For some days he had been refraining with some insistence from going off to New Romney again....
I do not know if this may count in palliation of his misconduct. Men, real Strong-Souled, Healthy Men, should be, I suppose, impervious to conversational atmospheres, but I have never claimed for Kipps a place at these high levels. The unquenchable fact remains that the next day he spent the afternoon with Ann and found no scruple in displaying himself a budding lover.
He had met her in the High Street, had stopped her, and almost on the spur of the moment had boldly proposed a walk, "for the sake of old times."
"I don't mind," said Ann.
Her consent almost frightened Kipps. His imagination had not carried him to that. "It would be a lark," said Kipps, and looked up the street and down. "Now?" he said.
"I don't mind a bit, Artie. I was just going for a walk along towards St. Mary's."
"Let's go that way be'ind the church," said Kipps, and presently they found themselves drifting seaward in a mood of pleasant commonplace. For a while they talked of Sid. It went clean out of Kipps' head at that early stage even that Ann was a "girl" according to the exposition of Chitterlow, and for a time he remembered only that she was Ann. But afterwards, with the reek of that talk in his head, he lapsed a little from that personal relation. They came out upon the beach and sat down in a tumbled, pebbly place, where a meagre grass and patches of sea poppy were growing, and Kipps reclined on his elbow and tossed pebbles in his hand, and Ann sat up, sunlit, regarding him. They talked in fragments. They exhausted Sid, they exhausted Ann, and Kipps was chary of his riches.
He declined to a faint love-making. "I got that 'arf sixpence still," he said.
"Reely?"