Page:Possession (1926).pdf/498

 lish nurse was there, waiting, and the doctor had come and gone to return in a little while. Everything went well, save that the patient (so the nurse explained to Hattie and Thérèse) was not accepting the ordeal in the proper mood. She had insisted upon playing bridge, when she should have been walking up and down, up and down, to hasten the birth of the child. She sat now in the drawing-room at a table with Lily, Jean and Rebecca, angry at not being allowed to smoke, desperate that she had no control over what was happening to her. She sat, holding her cards stiffly before her, clad in a peignoir of coral silk, her black hair drawn tightly back as she had worn it at her concerts.

"Two spades," she said, and glared at Rebecca when the latter doubled. There was a dew of perspiration on her high smooth forehead and she bit her lips from time to time. She was magnificent and dominating (thought Lily). Really it was an amazing kind of fierce beauty.

In one corner de Cyon, ousted from the pavilion, sat reading his foreign newspapers—the threads which kept him in touch with the world of foreign politics. They lay spread out before him. . . Le Journal de Genève, Il Seccolo of Milan, La Tribuna of Rome, the London Post, the London Times, the New York Times, Le Figaro, L'Echo de Paris, Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin, L'Œuvre. . . in a neat pile, from which he lifted them calmly in turn, to read them through and clip now here, now there, with the long silver scissors a bit of news, a king's remarks, a prime minister's speech or the leader of some Socialist editor. Ensconced behind the gilt table, he appeared cool and aloof, with his white hair and his pink face. What was going on almost at his side had no interest for him. His first wife had been barren and his second he had married too late. He clipped and clipped, the lean scissors snipping their way through words in Italian, Spanish, German, French and English. Snip. . . snip. . . snip. . . they ran. . ..

A dozen feet from him and well away from the bridge table