"I sometimes take a little nap after luncheon," said Colonel Tempest with dignity. "You might go out then, Di."
"Miss Tempest will in any case go out morning and afternoon," said the doctor with decision.
Colonel Tempest had before had his doubts whether the doctor understood his case, but now they were confirmed. He wished to change doctors, and a painful scene ensued between him and Di, in the course of which a hole was kicked in the duvet, and a cup of broth was upset. But it is an ascertained fact that women are not amenable to reason. Di sewed up the hole in the duvet, rubbed the carpet, and remained, as Colonel Tempest hysterically informed her, "as obstinate as her mother before her."
On the second morning after her arrival at Brighton she was sitting with Colonel Tempest, reading the papers to him, when the waiter brought in the letters. There were none for her, two for her father. One was a foreign letter with a blue French stamp. She took them to him where he lay on the sofa.
Colonel Tempest looked at them.
"Nothing from Archie again," he said. "He does not care even to write and ask whether I am alive or dead."
"Archie is not a good hand at writing," said Di, echoing, for the sake of saying something, the time-honoured masculine plea for exemption from the tedium of domestic correspondence.
"This is John's hand," said Colonel Tempest. "A Paris postmark. How these rich men do rush about!"
Di had actually not known it was John's writing. She had never seen it, to her knowledge, but nevertheless it appeared to her extraordinary that she had not at once divined that it was his. She was not anxious to hear her father's comments on John's letter, or the threadbare remark, sacred to the poor relation, that when the rich one was sitting down to draw a cheque he might just as well have written it for double the amount. He would never have known the difference. The poor relation always knows exactly how much the rich one can afford to give. So Di told her father she was going out, and left the room.
It stung her, as she laced her boots, to think that John had probably sent another cheque to cover their expenses at the hotel, and that the fried soles and semolina-pudding which she had ordered for luncheon would be paid for by him. It exasperated her still more to know that whatever John sent, Colonel Tempest would pronounce to be mean.