Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/18

 open, as if refusing to continue the self-deception. The tree trunks glistened like beavers; for the rain beat relentlessly through their thin foliage, in short, the world was wet to the skin, and Richard Beresford with the world.

His thoughts drifted back to the little family dinner-party at Drewitt House, and the bomb-shell he had launched into its midst. It was his aunt's enquiry as to when he proposed returning to the Foreign Office that had been the cause of all the trouble.

His simple statement that he had done with the Foreign Office and all its ways, and intended to go for a long walking-tour, had been received with consternation. He smiled at the recollection of the scene; Lady Drewitt's anger, his cousin, Lord Drewitt's lifting of his eyebrows, the snap in Edward Seymour's ferret-like little eyes, Mrs. Edward's look of frightened interrogation directed at Lady Drewitt, and her subsequent endeavour to mirror her aunt's disapproval. It was all so comical, so characteristic.

He had found it impossible to explain what had led up to his decision. He could not tell Lady Drewitt and the Seymours that the trenches had revolutionised his ideas, that a sort of intellectual Bolshevism had taken possession of him, that he now took a more detached and impersonal view of life, that things which had mattered before were not the things which mattered now. They would not have understood.