He was exhilarated by the problem of getting out and this time he succeeded. The car, roaring with power, pulled itself over the branches and out of the hollow. Then, with all their power on, they shot ahead and drove down the dusky road. It was growing quite dark.
“This is our cottage. Think I’ll stop and give the car a drink.”
They climbed out and over a drifted path into the veranda.
“Jolly place in summer,” said Wentworth, finding the right key on his ring and pushing the door open. “You can get a little warmer in here if you’re cold.”
There were electric lights and he switched them on quickly. The bright chintzes of the living-room looked warm and Horatia’s sense of well-being increased. What a nice place and how pleasant to be rich! He made her sit down and put her feet for fear of chill on a cushioned hassock. Then he brought her a glass of water.
“With apologies. Next time we’ll have food and a real party. If I’d thought we would have had one tonight.”
“Is this your cottage?”
“Father gave it to me when I was twenty-one. We had lots of house parties here while I was in college and he liked it. I suppose he thought it kept us straight—a place like this. My sister uses it now every summer. It’s a great place for kids. And now to fill the radiator and be off again to civilization.”
Civilization was a small table in a hotel dining-room and a hot supper, ordered for her by Anthony without a question. Horatia was very hungry, hungry as she seldom was, healthy though she was. And it was a pleasant hotel, like everything else in this excursion. A hotel with no music and no place for dancing—with oldish waitresses instead of waiters in dinner-coats, and with red wall-paper and gas-lights—and somewhere an inimitable chef—no, a woman cook, who put onions frankly in her soup and let the pudding confess to a cornstarch origin and made biscuits that were light as air. They talked about many things over the soup. It warmed them into immense friendliness. Horatia told how she had always loved weather—loved all kinds of it, rains and storms and winds, how it excited her; and how she loved all things that stimulated her energies and made her work—and how she loved her work for the same reasons; because on a newspaper one day was up and the next down so that you were always on the alert; and how you lived in touch with the raw material of events before they’d been softened or hardened or molded by public opinion. He listened and nodded and the friendly old waitress had to push a platter of fried chicken before them to hush them.
Then somehow they were talking of what they had done when they were children, and little tales of West Park popped up in Horatia’s mind, tales which she had almost forgotten—of the time when Uncle George had fled before Aunt Caroline’s dictum that he should spank Maud and Horatia for dancing on a broken spring on the leather sofa in the living-room. It was all irrelevant and friendly. Anthony had his own tales. He had been a nice little boy, Horatia decided, a little boy fond of dogs and swimming. She liked his saying that the old veterinary surgeon had been his best friend when he was a boy. He told her about his mother and his sister and the brother who had looked like his father and who had died at sixteen, which saddened them momentarily. Then over the bones of the fried chicken they talked of futures—hers and his. Of the places on the earth which they would like to see. He had much more background than Horatia, having been to Germany and England before the war, and he had seen England and France again while he was flying abroad. The Europe of before the war was what he liked to talk about.