“Frank can say what he likes,” answered the other, “but there’s nothing like mortal pain for making people entertaining.”
A few days later Miss Ley, who prided herself that she made plans only for the pleasure of breaking them, started for Italy.
PART II
I
Miss Ley returned to England at the end of February. Unlike the most of her compatriots, she did not go abroad to see the friends with whom she spent much time at home; and though Bella and Herbert Field were at Naples, Mrs. Murray in Rome, she took care systematically to avoid them. Rather was it her practice to cultivate chance acquaintance, for she thought the English in foreign lands betrayed their idiosyncrasies with a pleasant and edifying frankness. In Venice, for example, or at Capri, the delectable isle, romance might be seized as it were in the act, and all manner of oddities were displayed with a most diverting effrontery. In those places you meet middle-aged pairs, uncertainly related, whose vehement adventures startled the decorum of a previous generation. You discover how queer may be the most conventional, how ordinary the most eccentric. Miss Ley, with her discreet knack for extracting confidence, after her own staid fashion enjoyed herself immensely. She listened to the strange confessions of men who for their souls’ sake had abandoned the greatness of the world, and now spoke of their past zeal with indulgent irony; of women who for love had been willing to break down the very pillars of heaven, and now shrugged their shoulders in amused recollection of passion long since dead.
“Well, what have you fresh to tell me?” asked Frank, having met Miss Ley at Victoria, when he sat down to dinner in Old Queen Street.
“Nothing much. But I’ve noticed that when pleasure has exhausted a man he’s convinced that he has exhausted pleasure; then he tells you gravely that nothing can satisfy the human heart.”
But Frank had more important news than this, for Jenny, a week before, was delivered of a still-born child, and had been so ill that it was thought she could not recover. Now, however, the worst was over, and if nothing untoward befell she might be expected slowly to regain health.
“How does Basil take it?” asked Miss Ley.
“He says very little. He’s grown silent of late, but I’m afraid he’s quite heart-broken. You know how enormously he looked forward to the baby.”