CHAPTER XII
Rose was finishing a letter to Agatha on the balcony. She found it difficult to write to her sisters, they seemed so very far away.
She was afraid, too, that they might find her letters dull. You couldn’t go on describing the blue grotto; besides, neither Agatha nor Edith cared for descriptions of scenery, they always skipped them in books; and as far as Rose could tell nobody played any particular game in Capri. Young men shot birds on Sunday afternoons when they could, but they weren’t even the proper birds to shoot, so perhaps it was better not to mention them.
When Rose wrote to her people she always said “we” even when she was referring to things that she did by herself.
It wasn’t very like a Pinsent to give way to this illicit expansion of fact, but Rose comforted herself by thinking that after all, editors said “we” when there was only one of them writing, and most of the married people she knew expressed themselves in the plural, though that perhaps was because they really did the things together. Still, she went on writing “we” because she didn’t want her people to think anything funny about Léon. She had just got as far as “We have such jolly little dinners in the garden,” when she heard Léon’s whistle coming up the stairs. He stood looking at her a little curiously.
“You are writing,” he asked her, “to your people?”
“To Agatha,” she said. “Have you any message?”
Léon sometimes sent very amusing messages to Agatha. For a moment Léon did not reply, then he said, “And what do you say to them--of me--your people?”
Rose blushed, just the same wonderful pink tulip blush Léon had from the first particularly admired, but it was ill-timed, it looked guilty. It shot through his uneasy mind that she had been complaining of him to the Pinsents. In his irritable, resentful state it gave him a sudden sense of justification. Hadn’t he done already wonders for Rose? He had not made open love to Elise (until just now, of course), he had borne for over a month the ennui of Capri. He hadn’t so much as been to a café without his wife, and now he had almost decided not to leave her!
“Tell them,” he said bitterly, “that you are perfect, and that I am a monster of depravity. Almost all wives say that to their relatives sooner or later. You, it appears, have taken up the tone in good time!”