Let me admit, as I start to write, that the whole thing is my own fault.
I should never have come. I knew better. I have known better for years.
I have known that it is sheer madness to go and pay visits in other
people’s houses.
Yet in a moment of insanity I have let myself in for it and here I am.
There is no hope, no outlet now till the first of September when my
visit is to terminate. Either that or death. I do not greatly care
which.
I write this, where no human eye can see me, down by the pond--they call
it the lake--at the foot of Beverly-Jones’s estate. It is six o’clock
in the morning. No one is up. For a brief hour or so there is peace.
But presently Miss Larkspur--the jolly English girl who arrived last
week--will throw open her casement window and call across the lawn,
“Hullo everybody! What a ripping morning!” And young Poppleson will call
back in a Swiss yodel from somewhere in the shrubbery, and Beverly-Jones
will appear on the piazza with big towels round his neck and
shout, “Who’s coming for an early dip?” And so the day’s fun and
jollity--heaven help me--will begin again.
Presently they will all come trooping in to breakfast, in coloured
blazers and fancy blouses, laughing and grabbing at the food with mimic
rudeness and bursts of hilarity. And to think that I might have been
breakfasting at my club with the morning paper propped against the
coffee-pot, in a silent room in the quiet of the city.