“This afternoon, somewhere after four; you were on the beach.” She looked at him for a moment, standing very straight and her head flung back. “I am glad you enjoyed your row,” she said with a laugh.
“I must talk to Maradick about it,” he said to himself. He was quite prepared for complications; of course, there were bound to be in such a situation. But at present the memory of the wonderful afternoon enwrapped him like a fire, so that he could not think of anything else, he could not see anything but her eyes and smile and golden hair. The empty room hung before his eyes, with the white cloths on innumerable tables gleaming like white pools in rows across the floor, and dark mysterious men, who might be perhaps, at more brightly lighted times, waiters, moved silently from place to place. But beyond, outside the room, there shone the white curve of the boat stealing like a ghost across the water, and behind it the dark band of hill, the green clump of trees, the dusky, trembling figures of the sheep. Oh! glorious hour!
A little waiter, with a waistcoat that was far too large for him and a tie that had crept towards his right ear, hung in the background. Tony pushed his plate away and looked round.
“I say,” he said, “are you in love with anyone?”
The waiter, who hailed from Walham Green, and, in spite of his tender years, was burdened with five children and a sick wife, coughed apologetically.
“Well, sir,” he said, “to be strictly truthful, I can’t say as I am, not just at present. And perhaps it’s just as well, seeing as how I’ve been a married man these fifteen years.” He folded a table-cloth carefully and coughed again.
“Well, isn’t it possible to be in love with your wife?” asked Tony.
The waiter’s mind crept timidly back to a certain tea of shrimps and buns on the Margate sands many, very many years ago. He saw a red sun and a blue sky and some nigger minstrels, white and black; but that was another lifetime altogether, before there were children and doctor’s bills.
“Well, sir,” he said, “it gets kind o’ casual after a time; not that it’s anyone’s fault exactly, only times ’is ’ard and there’s the children and one thing and another, and there scarcely seems time for sentiment exactly.”
He coughed his way apologetically back into the twilight at the farther end of the room.