Opposite Julian, Eve leaned forward, propping her bare elbows on the table, disdainfully picking at the fruit, and talking. He looked at her smooth, beautiful arms, and little white hands that he had always loved. He knew that he preferred her company to any in the world. Her humour, her audacity, the width of her range, the picturesqueness of her phraseology, her endless inventiveness, her subtle undercurrent of the personal, though 'you' or 'I' might be entirely absent from her lips all seemed to him wholly enchanting. She was a sybarite of life, an artist; but the glow and recklessness of her saved her from all taint of intellectual sterility. He knew that his life had been enriched and coloured by her presence in it; that it would, at any moment, have become a poorer, a grayer, a less magical thing through the loss of her. He shut his eyes for a second as he realised that she could be, if he chose, his own possession, she the elusive and unattainable; he might claim the redemption of all her infinite promise; might discover her in the rôle for which she was so obviously created; might violate the sanctuary and tear the veils from the wealth of treasure hitherto denied to all; might exact for himself the first secrets of her unplundered passion. He knew her already as the perfect companion, he divined her as the perfect mistress; he reeled and shrank before the unadmitted thought, then looked across at her where she sat with an open fig half-way to her lips, and knew fantastically that they were alone upon an island of which he was all but king.
'A deserted city,' she was saying, 'a city of Portuguese settlers; pink marble palaces upon the edge of the water; almost crowded into the water by the encroaching jungle; monkeys peering through their ruined windows; on the sand, great sleepy tortoises; and, twining in and out of the broken doorways of the palaces, orchids and hibiscus—that is Trincomali! Would you like the tropics, I wonder, Julian? their exuberance, their vulgarity?... One buys little sacks full of precious stones; one puts in one's hand, and lets the sapphires and the rubies and the emeralds run through one's fingers.'
Their eyes met; and her slight, infrequent confusion overcame her....
'You aren't listening,' she murmured.
'You were only fifteen when you went to Ceylon,' he said, gazing at the blue smoke of his cigarette. 'You used to write to me from there. You had scarlet writing-paper. You were a deplorably affected child.'
'Yes,' she said, 'the only natural thing about me was my affectation.'
They laughed, closely, intimately.
'It began when you were three,' he said, 'and insisted upon always wearing brown kid gloves; your voice was even deeper then than it is now, and you always called your father Robert.'
'You were five; you used to push me into the prickly pear.'
'And you tried to kill me with a dagger; do you remember?'