Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/208

 She began to talk about the late Mr. Sampits, and when she had exhausted her second husband, she went on to speak of the late Mr. Duggan. She told Sorrell the most trivial and intimate details of her two subsequent marriages, overwhelming him with the steady and self-interested loquacity of the hotel-bore, and she did it so naturally that, Sorrell, growing bored, began to wonder at himself for sitting there and listening to her. He heard how Sampits had died of alcoholic nephritis, and how Duggan's chief characteristic had appeared to be a prejudice in favour of the old-fashioned. He heard what sort of clothes they wore, and what they ate, and what they would not eat, and he found himself yawning with immense surprise at her banal confidences.

Why—on earth—was she telling him all this? She began to appear to him as little more than a stout and rather immodest person, just like dozens of other elderly women who loved to hold some helpless listener blockaded in a gossip's corner. She seemed to become less and less dangerous the more she bored him with her crude outpourings. The world was full of such women. He had seen them by the score in the lounge of the Pelican, sitting down solidly to exhaust the patience of some too good-natured listener.

After half an hour of it he glanced at his watch.

"I'm sorry—but I have to"

She drew her breath and smiled upon him.

"Of course. You must be such a busy man. We have had quite a nice talk, haven't we? And, O, before I forget, my friends at Bath have asked me to go on there to-morrow. Will it inconvenience you—if I give up my room?"

"Not in the least. We are turning people away every ay."

It was not till he had smoked a pipe after tea that Sorrell grasped the curious fact that she had never mentioned Christopher. She had talked of no one but herself and her dead men-folk. Curious! Had he been an alarmist, and was she just a fat commonplace egoist who asked for nothing but an audience? People grew fat in mind as well as in body. It seemed to him that he had exaggerated her significance.