“They! They, Venice, will say anything....”
“Yes, of course, but you know what I mean. And Naps, you see, can’t bear any one to be ill and miserable, and I’m sure he’s got an idea that Mrs. Storm is lonely up there, but really, I think, he might consider himself a little, don’t you? And so I ordered the car at three o’clock this afternoon, and off we’ll go. He’ll be surprised when he gets here....”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose he will.”
“Well,” said Venice, sticking out that Pollen jaw, “there’s no use in hanging about Paris, is there? And so I sent him a message to the Embassy, where he’s been all morning, to come as soon as he could and not worry about getting ‘sleepers.’ And as I’ve already had his things packed we can start off as soon as he’s here, which will be while we’re at coffee, I shouldn’t wonder.” That Pollen jaw! What, I wondered, was Venice thinking of when she stuck out that Pollen jaw like that? Maybe she had been disturbed by Napier’s white-thunder looks when they got back to the hotel last night and was wanting to get him to herself and normal as quickly as she could—and Provence, Oh, Provence! It is not every day that a girl can motor through Provence with her lover. Venice’s love was like a solid marble monument, and I said to myself that one should respect illness but also one should respect love, and so I held my peace.
Napier had not come by the time we had finished luncheon, and as we took two deep chairs in the corner of the lounge, where we would have coffee, Venice asked me if I knew anything about the psychology of men as regards children. When I had picked myself up I said that I would reserve my defence, laughing heartily the while, but now there was a cloud of thought over Venice’s mad-blue eyes, and she was ever so serious, a flat cigarette tortured between her full, pale, dry lips. Venice, you know, said she hated the taste of lip-salve; but, with no idea at all of ever doubting Venice’s word, one had noticed that it was only since her marriage that she had grown to hate it so consistently, and so it might be that Napier had made a face after kissing her one day, for it is the affectation of Englishmen to be tiresome about cosmetics, and if they are not tiresome about cosmetics they cannot be the right sort.
“Sugar?” I asked, and she nodded intently, her mad-blue eyes absorbed on a point of the thick carpet.
“How,” I said, “you will love Provence!”
“Listen,” she said sharply. Wise those eyes were now, and steady as stars in a cavern, looking into me as though judging me, balancing life.
“Well?” I said, to get it over. But what could she know?
She made herself look unimportant. “Oh, it’s only,” she said, “that I can’t have a baby.” And she looked at me with a frantic smile, and because every second of her twenty-one years seemed to me to be in that frantic smile I did not know what on earth to say, saying: “You have probably been to some silly doctor——”