Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/207

 She divined his guardedness towards her.

"Funny thing, life! Here—we are—like a couple of strangers. You and I. Do you remember those days at Shanklin?"

"Nearly twenty years ago." He sat down.

"O,—well, we were incompatibles. I'm afraid I gave you some bad times. I was much more greedy for life."

He was looking towards his window, and not at her.

"So you are never curious?"

"About what?"

"What sort of success or failure I made of things—afterwards. Never thought?"

"Why should I?"

"He felt that she was smiling."

"So you never forgave me. Poor old Stephen! You married an explosive person. But when one comes to a certain stage"

His silence neither encouraged nor repulsed her. He was letting her make all the thrusts.

"One begins to look back—instead of forward."

"You think so?"

"Well, I do. Of course—it depends. A woman grows rather lonely."

She observed his profile. She had dropped one little stone into the pool of his silence, but so far as she could judge it had stirred no ripples.

"Suppose you just drift about now?" he said.

"I? Not a bit of it. I'm the comfy cat, my dear man. A house in South Audley Street. Three months at Cannes—perhaps,—and a few days in my car. Friends,—yes. A busy old bachelor like you—doesn't bother. I'm so well off."

He remained utterly irresponsive, a man with a blank yet alert face, and a judicial manner. She gave a little humorous sigh, observed him ironically with her fine eyes, and diverged to other topics. He had shown no sign of reacting either to sentiment or to the hint of her prosperity. It seemed to her that he took himself with the same old, desperate seriousness. And he was desperately serious in his desire to keep her and Christopher apart.

"Hopeless—as ever—with women," she decided. "No idea of compromise."