“Where is she now?”
“Oh! does it matter to you?... Look here, Marion! This—this I didn’t
anticipate. I didn’t mean this thing to smash down on you like this.
But, you know, something had to happen. I’m sorry—sorry to the bottom
of my heart that things have come to this between us. But indeed, I’m
taken by surprise. I don’t know where I am—I don’t know how we got
here. Things took me by surprise. I found myself alone with her one
day. I kissed her. I went on. It seemed stupid to go back. And
besides—why should I have gone back? Why should I? From first to last,
I’ve hardly thought of it as touching you.... Damn!”
She scrutinised my face, and pulled at the ball-fringe of the little
table beside her.
“To think of it,” she said. “I don’t believe I can ever touch you
again.”
We kept a long silence. I was only beginning to realise in the most
superficial way the immense catastrophe that had happened between us.
Enormous issues had rushed upon us. I felt unprepared and altogether
inadequate. I was unreasonably angry. There came a rush of stupid
expressions to my mind that my rising sense of the supreme importance
of the moment saved me from saying. The gap of silence widened until it
threatened to become the vast memorable margin of some one among a
thousand trivial possibilities of speech that would vex our relations
for ever.
Our little general servant tapped at the door—Marion always liked the
servant to tap—and appeared.
“Tea, M’m,” she said—and vanished, leaving the door open.
“I will go upstairs,” said I, and stopped. “I will go upstairs” I
repeated, “and put my bag in the spare room.”
We remained motionless and silent for a few seconds.
“Mother is having tea with us to-day,” Marion remarked at last, and
dropped the worried end of ball-fringe and stood up slowly....
And so, with this immense discussion of our changed relations hanging
over us, we presently had tea with the unsuspecting Mrs. Ramboat and
the spaniel. Mrs. Ramboat was too well trained in her position to
remark upon our somber preoccupation. She kept a thin trickle of talk
going, and told us, I remember, that Mr. Ramboat was “troubled” about
his cannas.
“They don’t come up and they won’t come up. He’s been round and had an
explanation with the man who sold him the bulbs—and he’s very heated
and upset.”
The spaniel was a great bore, begging and doing small tricks first at
one and then at the other of us. Neither of us used his name. You see
we had called him Miggles, and made a sort of trio in the baby-talk of
Mutney and Miggles and Ming.