After he had been taken to scratch the backs of the pigs, and to eat plums in the orchard, Anna proposed a game of clock-golf.
“Are you coming to play?” they called out from the lawn to Concha, Arnold, and David, who were sitting in the loggia.
“No, we’re not!” called back Arnold.
Concha would have liked very much to have gone; first, because it seemed a pity to have incurred for nothing Teresa’s stare and the Doña’s raised eyebrows; second, because she had been finding it uphill work to keep Arnold civil, and David in the conversation. But her childhood’s habit of docility to Arnold had become automatic, so she sat on in the loggia.
“I think, maybe, I’ll go and try my hand ... they seem nice wee kiddies,” said David, and he got up, in his slow, deliberate way, and strolled off towards the party on the lawn.
“Kiddies!” exclaimed Arnold in a voice of disgust, when he was out of ear-shot. “The Scotch always seem to use the wrong slang.”
“You’re getting as fussy as Teresa,” laughed Concha.
“Oh, if it comes to that, she needn’t think she’s the only person with a sense of language. What’s the matter with her? Each time I come down she seems more damned superior. Who does she think she is? She’s reached the point of being dumb with superiorness, next she’ll go blind with it, then she’ll die of it,” and, frowning heavily, he began to fill his pipe.
His bitterness against Teresa dated from the days before the War when he used to write poetry. He had once read her some of his poems, and she, being younger and more brutal than she was now, had exclaimed, “But, Arnold, they’re absolutely dead! They’re decomposing with deadness.” He had never forgiven her.
“I suppose she gives you a pretty thin time, doesn’t she? She does hate you!”