Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/59

Rh good sense and will. From his father he took his artistic impulse. … And that father, a few years after his wife's death, had married a little half-German woman, whose only merits apparently were that she cooked to perfection and made his physical man thoroughly comfortable. Comfortable! He could marry for that, and have several more children—after the fine creature who had condescended to love him had died in her youth. …

Teresa looked at the Major's scarred cheek, and watched the loving care with which he extracted the meat from a lobster-tenacle [sic]—and she marvelled at the ways of man.

She and Gerald left the table when the dessert came on, and even then they were late and had to wait in the corridor of the concert-hall till the first number was finished. Teresa was out of humour, partly because she had not had time to change her dress, and she hated having to hurry; partly because Basil had called after her that he didn't think he should be home to dinner, and she suspected he meant to make a night of it, and drink more than was good for him. But Gerald's attempts at gaiety and his extreme nervousness ended by distracting her attention from herself. She had observed at lunch that he was drinking a good deal of whisky; and now in his physical