"Oh, yes, we all admit that, and show our contempt of the faculty by worshipping the possessor."
"Do you worship John Faber?"
"Collectively, yes; individually, not at all."
He thought upon it.
"I suppose you had a jolly time with him in Paris?"
"Oh, my dear Harry, what next? I saw him twice: once in the corridor of the hotel, then in his own rooms."
"In his rooms!"
"Yes; to tell him I never wished to see him again."
"Oh, you brick; that's the best thing I've heard. Of course, I knew you would. There's never been anything said, but you owed that to me—now, didn't you, puss?"
She would not answer him. They passed to the vague intimacies of an incomplete amour, in which their whispers were inaudible and the sound of voices in the cabin a warning discord. Eva still played an intolerable waltz. The harbour waves sported about the dinghy, tethered astern. Gabrielle wondered why it was that she was incapable of resisting all this; that she suffered this quite brainless boy to kiss her at his pleasure—a great bear with fearsome limbs cuddling her. Was it because of her twenty-three years of Suburbia? Because of an inherited instinct for the commonplace of the natural life—such a life as all about her lived, and would live in that little world of Hampstead? Or was it purely the call of sex—more potent than a thousand theories, imperious beyond all the laws of emperors and kings?