“Adela!”
She shut the door and went towards him, and as she did so she thought:
“If I had seen Alick Craven sitting there reading!”
“I was having a look at this.”
He held up the book. It was Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal.”
“Not the book for you!” she said. “Though your French is so good.”
“No.”
He laid it down, and she noticed the tangle of veins on his hand.
“The dandy in literature doesn’t appeal to me. I must say many of these poets strike me as decadent fellows, not helped to anything like real manliness by their gifts.”
She sat down on the sofa, just where she had sat to have those long talks with Craven about Waring and Italy, the sea people, the colours of the sails on those ships which look magical in sunsets, which move on as if bearing argosies from gorgeous hidden lands of the East.