And she thanked him and agreed.
He was debonair, gay and gracious: the lines in his face seemed to have been smoothed out, and the likeness to Charlie was strongly in evidence.
Dreaming ahead, she saw herself reluctantly, helplessly, plunging further and further into relationship with him. He would not weary of her soon. When once the thing started, the break with the past would inevitably be complete. Together they would be reckless, free; together they would snatch pleasure out of life’s worthlessness; for Julian had promised faithfully that he was going to give her exactly what she wanted, that he had learnt precisely how happiness was to be come by, and would teach her.... She had given him leave to teach her.
Judiciously he absented himself for the day; and she spent the morning with Mamma, watching all the internally-disordered people pass, cup in hand up and down the Place from spring to spring; and the afternoon with Mamma at the dressmaker’s; and the hours between tea and dinner with Mamma in the hotel-lounge, drearily banishing and recurring to thoughts of Roddy.
Mamma sent her out to buy a copy of the Continental Daily Mail, which shrill-voiced women were excitedly advertising in the Place. Through her lorgnette, Mamma scanned the announcement of recent arrivals, the political outlook, the new French train smash, yawned, remarked that the holiday season in England seemed marked as usual by murders and drowning fatalities, yawned again and went upstairs to rest before her bridge-party.
An hour yet till dinner and nothing to do but sit and think of things.
Idly she picked up the evilly printed sheets. Triple Boating Tragedy. Why were they always triple? What must it be like to be relatives and friends of a triple boating tragedy? But that was a class disaster, like a charabanc death—not general.
Sailing Fatality off St. Catherine’s, Isle of Wight. That was where Martin and Roddy were yachting. They might have witnessed it. Tragic End of Well-known Young Yachtsman.
She had an impulse to put down the paper; but a name caught her eye and she had to go on reading.
A dense fog in the Channel is presumed to be the cause of the death of Mr. G. M. St. V. Fyfe, one of the best known of the younger Solent yachtsmen.