Of a sudden that look was abolished utterly. He had caught sight of Sofia.
Her interest had been so excited by the singular confidences she had overheard that the girl had quite forgotten herself and her professional pose of blank neutrality. She was bending forward a little, forearms resting on the desk, frankly staring.
The man’s stride checked, his smile faded, his eyes grew wide and cloudy with bewilderment. For a moment Sofia thought him on the point of bowing, as one might on unexpectedly encountering an acquaintance after many years: there was that hint of impulse hindered by uncertainty. And in that moment the girl was conscious of a singular sensation of breathlessness, as if something impended whose issue might change all the courses of her life. A feeling quite insane and unaccountable, to be sure; and nothing came of it whatever. With a readiness so instant that the break in his walk must have been imperceptible to anybody but Sofia, the man recollected himself, composed his face, and proceeded to the door.
Confounded with inexplicable disappointment, Sofia sat unstirring.
In the open doorway the man turned and looked back, not at her, but at Karslake, as if of half a mind to return and say something more to the younger man. But he didn’t.
He never came back.
III
THE AGONY COLUMN
Sofia dated from that afternoon the first stirrings of a discontent which grew in her throughout the summer till everything related to her lot seemed abominable in her sight.
Even without this subjective inquietude it would have been an unpleasant summer. All the world was at sixes and sevens, the social unrest stirred up by the war showed no signs of subsiding, but indeed, quite the contrary, there was trouble in the very air—ominous portents of a storm whose dull, grim growling down the horizon could be heard only too clearly by those who did not wilfully close their ears, grin fatuous complacence, and bleat like brainless sheep: “All’s well!”
High-spirited youth and witless wealth a-lust for strange new pleasures turned from the long strain of conflict to indulgence in endless orgies of extravagance like nothing ever witnessed by a world long since surfeited with contemplation of weird excesses: daily that wild dance of death attained wilder stages of saturnalia, the bands blaring ever louder to drown the mutter of savage elemental forces working underneath the crust.