Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/31

 grey sheets of rain, a grey prospect before him, and then that girl's grey eyes. They had seemed to change everything. They were like grey fire, seeming to blot out the other greys, as the dawn makes the stars to pale.

It was to him a new experience to find a girl monopolising his thoughts. The habit of a life-time had been to place women somewhere between dances and croquet. He had flirted with them in a superficial way, they had amused him; but they had never bulked largely in his life. Tommy Knowles of "the House" had once said that there was little hope for a country composed of men such as Beresford, who placed runs before kisses, and saw more in a dropped goal than a glad eye.

He seemed to have had so little time for girls. There had been games to play, books to read, pictures to see, and such a host of other interests that women had been rather crowded out. Somehow they never seemed to strike an interesting note in conversation. It was invariably about the plays they had seen, the band that was playing, the quality of the floor upon which they were dancing, common friends, or else gush about George Bernard Shaw, or Maeterlinck.

He fell to wondering what Aunt Caroline or the Edward Seymours would have thought of her. They regarded him as mad because he preferred the open road to the Foreign Office; but if they were to see a girl sitting on a gate in the rain, smoking a cigarette with apparent enjoyment, they would in