“Don’t you think we ought to please Lydia and go to Dinard and wear wonderful clothes, and mix with fashionable folk, and have expensive meals and gamble in the Casino, and dance and do our duty as self-respecting people?”
“You have but to change yourself into whatever fairy thing you like, my princess,” said he, “and I will follow you. Where you are, the world is. Where you are not, there is the blankness of before creation.”
Sitting that night, with his back against the veranda, he thought of this speech of the afternoon. Formulated a bit self-consciously, it was nevertheless true. The landscape, no matter what it was, existed merely as a setting for her. Even in this jewelled wonder of moonlit sea and sky there was the gap of the central gem.
He rolled and lit another cigarette—this time, surely, the very last. Why she took so long to disrobe, he never strove to conjecture. Her exquisite feminine distance from him was a conception too tremulous to be gripped with a rough hand and brutally examined. That was the lure and the delight of her, mystical, paradoxical—he could define it only vaguely as the nearness of her set in a far-off mystery. At once she was concrete and strong as the sea, and as elusive as the Will-o’-the-Wisp of his dreams.
Thus the imaginative lover; the man who, by imagining fantasies to be real, had made them real; who, grasping realities, had woven round them the poet’s fantasy.
And meanwhile Olivia, secure in her happiness, kept him waiting and dreaming because she had made a romantic vow to record, before going to sleep, each day’s precious happenings in a diary which she kept under lock and key in her dressing-case. She wrote sitting up in bed, and now and then she sniffed and smiled as the soft air came through the open window laden with the perfume of the cigarette.
CHAPTER XII
IN the course of time, Janet Philimore and her attendant father, the General, arrived at their house on The Point, and as Olivia, apprised of their advent, did not tie a white satin bow on her gate, General and Miss Philimore left cards on the newly wedded couple, or, more exactly, a pencilled leaf torn out of a notebook.
Thus arose a little intimacy which Olivia encouraged on Alexis’s account. Had not her father and brothers trained her in the ways of men, one of which vital ways was that which led to the social intercourse of man with man? Besides, it was a law of sex. If she had not a woman to talk to, she declared, she would go crazy. It was much more comforting to powder one’s nose in the privacy of the gynæceum than beneath man’s unsympathetic stare. Conversely it had been a dictum of her father’s that, in order to enjoy port, men must be released from the distracting chatter of women.