And her wicker chair broke out in fantastic chorus as her whole body seemed to turn to him.
“Are you?” she cried comically.
From behind them the noise of a piano suddenly burst on their silence. It lashed out into the darkness in a furious medley, then softened down to classical sobriety—then again a furious medley, then a jingling step, then to something very softly played.
“That’s little Johnny,” Virginia explained.
They listened. For Johnny had the art of seducing attention while he played; he played perversely, his touch had a delicate and impish genius, and he mixed up fugues and fox-trots with almost passionate cheek; he played like a tired genius, and they listened. He stopped soon....
“He always does that for five minutes before going to bed,” Virginia told him, “drunk or sober. So if you pass any house anywhere in the night and hear that noise, you will know that Johnny is about to go to bed. He says it’s his swan song, and that he likes to repeat his swan song every night so that he won’t feel it so much on his last on earth. Nice Johnny....”
Suddenly she stretched out a hand and touched Ivor’s arm, so unexpectedly that it startled him. There are women who appear incapable of touching one, and when they do, no matter how lightly, their touch seems to have a fabulous meaning. He had not looked at her for a long time, he had been staring into the darkness, but now she startled him into staring at her.
“You may be thinking,” she said wistfully, “that it’s rather indecent of me to speak so plainly to you about George. Please don’t think that, Ivor, for I’m not used to confiding in people; in fact, I’ve never done it before, and I shall be so easily frightened off.”
“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “And that’s why I wired to you to come down here. I’m generally supposed to be a secret kind of person, you know. ‘She never tells,’ people say. But I wired to you because I felt I couldn’t bear the burden of things alone for another second. It seems silly....”
“And I thought,” she said shyly, “that telling you all this might explain a bit of that terrible last night in England....”