And the two seekers after a quiet life strolled through the city together. They returned home a little after midnight, having made a very heroic and quite successful fight against care.
CHAPTER VII
RETROSPECT WITH THE SEARCH-LIGHT
'D'autres jours ouvriront les portes,
La forêt garde les verrous,
La forêt brûle autour de nous,
C'est la clarté des feuilles mortes,
Qui brûlent sur le seuil des portes....'—Maeterlinck.
At the end of the first week in March the Venables went to Sicily; they would stay there, probably, for the rest of the month.
'So for three weeks we shan't have a chance of eating too much at lunch,' Tommy remarked, on the evening after they had gone. 'Pity, isn't it? I loved those lunches.'
Betty nodded. She was feeling horribly flat. They both, that first evening, felt horribly flat. By the measure of their flatness they might have gauged the late immensity of their interest; there was revelation in it. To shake it off they went to their favourite gambling-place, and lost some money, and talked to some friends, and in general raised their spirits.
Something of this convivial nature they did every evening for a week. Then they stopped. Inexplicably, it was becoming boring. On the first night it had cheered them; on the second and third they had shut their eyes to the fact that they were bored; the other nights had been, growingly, of the nature of a fight against something—they could not have said what. It was something which seemed to grow, slowly, vaguely, yet with an irresistible sureness.