"Well, I shan't offer to do that for you," she said, with a touch of hardness in her tone. "Good-bye till Sunday."
I wrote my letter and composed myself for the night. One habit clung to Raney in peace and war, sunshine and rain: he was the worst correspondent in either hemisphere. Sometimes a friend would report meeting him in Bangkok or Pernambuco or Port Sudan; sometimes a total stranger would bring me a message from Mexico City; sometimes he would arrive in person, expressing surprise that I should wonder what had become of him. I should have pardoned his laxity were it not that like all other bad correspondents he felt aggrieved if his friends omitted to write to him. So I wrote and received no answer: every Thursday half an hour was set religiously aside for him, and every morning for a time I scanned the casualty lists for news of a graver kind.
Sonia was as good as her word and arrived on Sunday in time for tea. We talked at random for a while, and then when one subject was exhausted and I was casting about for another, she remarked without warning:
"I say, we've always been pretty good friends, haven't we, George? I wonder why. I suppose we've always been distressingly candid to each other."
"You've told me some things about yourself that still surprise me," I said, thinking of her account of the motor tour with Webster.
"I expect they'd surprise me if I could remember them," she answered, with a return to her old manner. "D'you think you understand me?"
"God forbid!" I exclaimed.
"Well, will you oblige me by not trying to understand what I'm going to tell you?"
"When you're as full of influenza as I am that's not difficult."