She leaned back and twirled her parasol languishly. To see her face he had to turn his head.
“I will kiss you now if you like, coram publico. You’re bewitching enough,” he said in his rough fashion.
“The idea is unimaginative and—repulsive,” replied Minna. And she began to look idly at the sea.
It was at its loveliest that afternoon, melting through all gradations from cobalt to pale turquoise, flecked with the rich tones of the brown Mediterranean sails, and meeting far ahead in a sapphire haze the dreamy stretch of the Cap d’Antibes. But Minna’s thoughts were far from its intoxicating beauty. She wished she had not come for this drive. This man was getting upon her nerves. She had half intended to lash him with ridicule and set him adrift. But she lacked courage. In his last admiring glance she had read that which made her fear. Her nervousness began to grow hysterical, especially after the lapse of some minutes during which he had not spoken.
“Do say something,” she said at last, irritably.
“I thought you were absorbed in the poetry of nature,” he replied.
“You Englishmen are so heavy. You were scandalised at meeting a crowd of shady foreigners at my house last night. They can talk amusingly. That’s why.”
“An Englishman generally acts, which is better,” said Gerard.
They pursued the theme for a while; then, piqued by her disadvantageous comparison, he began to make love outright. As he proceeded, her sense of loathing and of impotence increased. She scarcely spoke. Gerard took her silence for assumption of modesty; the satirical smile deepened about his lips.
The ponies went down the white road at a spanking pace. They had reached the open country and traffic was scanty. The road undulated between banks pungent with thyme and rosemary; now rose in full view of the sea and the great sweep of coast, now skirted villas nestling in the slopes that heave downwards to the shore from the cool grey Maritime Alps, shimmering against the violet sky. Swarthy, barelegged children ran out from the wayside cottages to stare at the wheels flashing amidst the cloud of dust, and now and then a great shovel-hatted curé looked up from his greasy breviary as the English couple dashed by. Suddenly at the top of a steep incline a bicyclist whirred past them, and coasted swiftly down. The ponies shied, plunged. The phaeton was not fitted with a brake. Gerard, deep in amorous schemes and taken off his guard, slashed the ponies, tried to pull them up, bungled, with the result that they bolted furiously down the hill.