The two men shook hands; in the looks they exchanged was all the antagonism of an unconfessed rivalry.
“How goes the ‘system’?” said Legard. It was the most disagreeable thing he could think of at the moment.
“Thank you,” said the other, his face immovable. “Pretty well, pretty well, but we ‘other’ gamblers never mention it; we are afraid, don’t you know. By the way, how is your dear wife? Give her my compliments. I am so sorry not to see her. I have been calling on Mrs. Travis and Miss Ley, and now I am afraid there isn’t time.”
Legard winced, he had got the worst of the exchanges.
“My wife is not very well, thank you. Good-bye, don’t let me make you lose your train.”
“Good-bye, my dear fellow,” murmured Nielsen, putting up his green-lined umbrella, and disappearing at a slow, square walk in the direction of the railway station.
Left to himself, Giles returned to his moody, eager contemplation of the closed, green shutters. The afternoon sun streamed obliquely through the yellow sprays of a huge mimosa that hung balancing over the terrace wall, and the scent of roses and heliotrope was heavy on the faint puffs of air that came from the great tideless sea. Small brown lizards chased each other up and down the smooth walls of the hotel, and a mazy, shifting web of humming things and of butterflies wove itself over the stony waste of the terrace.
The domination of sex veiled all these things from Legard’s senses. Something different, something unseizably different in the pressure of a girl’s hand, and the world was changed to him.
Constitutionally lazy, constitutionally and unobtrusively egoist, he had come slowly to the realisation of the upheaval of foundations. It was too far, too foreign, too altogether strange. Yet, when it had come, it seemed to him the most natural thing to exchange a world of sun, of sweet sounds and scents, of colour, of resigned humdrum, of bored and gentle pleasure-seeking, for another world of fiercely passionate longing, of ache, of delight, of absolute absorption in the one idea—a world from which everything else was barred.
All that spring at Mentone he had accepted the one more beautiful thing that had come into his life, as for many years he had accepted the sun, the air, the flowers, the sea, everything that was fair in a very fair and pleasant land. They had become to him a part of his nature, so that he no longer wondered at them, and, Englishman though he was, gazed at the bewildered tourist with the mildly contemptuous surprise of the Southerner, to whom these things were the merest necessities of existence.