"I was getting a little chilly." Fanshaw bent to pick up a pebble to hide his flushed face. He threw the pebble as far as he could out across the surf, caught up his overcoat and followed Nan. She had already started across the rocks. They walked round the edge of the harbor towards the town. Under the grey sky slightly marbled with sunlight the shingled sharp-roofed houses scattered unevenly among lanes and low picket fences looked out hostilely through the small panes of their windows at the sprouting tulips and hyacinths in their dooryards.
"Are we going to the redheaded woman's?" said Fanshaw after a while.
"Where else can we go?"
"Nowhere, I suppose, but she does give one such small cups." His voice faltered as he spoke. What a waste of breath were all these trivialities when he ought to be telling Nan ... If he could only catch the proper note, mock-serious, flippant, as one would have made love to a marquise with powdered hair in a garden by LeNotre. And Wenny had loved Nan. Fanshaw was trying to imagine some sulfurous boiling passion. He saw Wenny brown and flushed, sweaty and dusty like a runner after a race, break through all this stage scenery of New England houses and trees and sea, tearing it apart with hard knobbed fingers the way he'd pulled down the window curtains one night when he was drunk. Wenny's face dead, purple-splotched under the sheet on the marble slab at the Morgue. And Nan and I going on, springtime and autumn, breakfast and luncheon and dinner.
They had reached the teahouse. A coldframe under the window was full of violets. They settled themselves at a little table, breathing deep of the fugitive scent of the violets.
After all, Fanshaw was thinking, does it bring any more to kick against the pricks? A certain position in the world ... He could hear his mother's tremulous voice: Your beautiful, lovely career. Perhaps it's best for Wenny that he died. Wenny grown old, sodden, drunken, losing his fire and his good looks; Verlaine's last absinthe-haunted days; Lord Byron, a puffy-faced Don Juan; the verdict of history. Circumspectly, with infinite grace, they went about life in the eighteenth century, never headlong, half-cocked. Nan and I can be like that.
"Delicious, isn't it, to smell this mixture of tea and violets?" he said.
"I was thinking," said Nan, "How wonderful if he were only here. Isn't it silly?"
"I was thinking of him too," said Fanshaw.
And Wenny loved Nan. Yet, was it any more unbearable for him than just now when I looked in her eyes and a light like the light bursting out from the center in that Greco Nativity shot all through me? Never to have held a woman in your arms and kissed her. Pent up aching rivers ... Called for madder music and for stronger wine.