We walked into Dinard. The magasin that enshrined "It" was near the Casino, and there, in an impermanent little white-screened and gilt-chaired shop that had hardly been open a fortnight and would close down again the moment the season was over, I had a soothing half-hour while Alec's money took wing.
"Mais tiens, Madame"—the saleswoman's witty fingers touched, hovered, butterflied, while the hat became half a dozen different things under the diablerie—"posé commé ça, en effet sur l'oreille—Claire, la voile verte—legèrment—oh, m'sieu!" A delectable gesture of admiration of everything and everybody concerned, the hat, the veil, Madge, herself, as unabashed as the attitudinising of the sunbrowned young athletes. "On dirait un sourire sur la tête de Madame!"
So, on a purely hypothetical rate of exchange, Madge bought three, and we sought the teashop and Jennie.
All English-speaking Dinard meets at that teashop in the afternoon. From four o'clock onwards it is a mob of youths in the blazers of Eton and Charterhouse and the Old Merchant Taylors, forking gateaux from the glass counters for themselves, their sisters, other fellows' sisters, their sisters' friends. Their days sped in tennis, bathing, tennis, a hurried déjeuner between the sets, tennis, watching tennis as they waited for a partner or a court, a sudden flocking to the Le Bras for tea, tennis, dancing, chocolates, and the programme for the tennis for the next day. They filled the ground-floor of the shop, made a continual coming and going on the staircase that led to the room upstairs. I steered Madge towards the table where Jennie was already seated, and found myself with young Rugby on my right, his shirt open at the neck, flannels hitched up over his white-socked ankles. About me buzzed the whirl of talk.
"He saw him at Ambleteuse, and he did it in ten in his walking-boots on grass——"
"Rot! It's run in metres, not yards, and the record's ten and seventh-tenths——"
"American——"
"I bet you——"
"Well, it's nearly the same, and in his boots on grass——"
"Oh, put your head in a bag! Jennie, we've got Number Four Court for five-thirty, remember——"