Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/235

 over the chocolate box. They had a playful struggle. The smell of her hair smote him. His mother smiled.

At Maidenhead they had tea in the garden of one of the hotels. Fluffy Tarrant took Christopher on the river in a punt with orange and purple cushions. It appeared to be her turn. She looked at Kit with the considering eyes of a young leopardess; her pose was one of extreme and cheeky frankness; she pretended to be as old as Eve.

She told Kit that he was a child.

"You don't know—anything."

She did not say what anything was. She splashed him with her paddle, and appeared ironical and sophisticated and superior. On the way home she and Lola exchanged seats, and to Kit Miss Tarrant appeared all thigh-bone. The pressure was constant; it did not flicker and jerk and quiver. It was more ardent or might have been, yet was less disturbing. Kit's fate promised that dark women were to trouble him, dark women with a certain languorous and appealing type of brown eye.

They dressed and drove to the Halcyon Club. A young elderly man with a high forehead, a neat smudge of black hair, and a very small mouth, was waiting for them in the lounge. His name was Luke Sykes. He was to make the fourth for the postprandial dance.

Kit took an immediate dislike to Mr. Sykes. He was the sort of man who looked bored and wearily superior, and who said—"O, really!" to everything. He talked about places and people that Kit had never heard of,—and his trousers were too well braided.

They dined, and emptied two bottles of champagne. Kit was facing Miss Tarrant, also the naked statue of Venus, and he would not acknowledge the presence of the statue, and Miss Tarrant seemed wickedly aware of his self-suppression. Lola grew somewhat excited; she talked a great deal, laughed, jerked that mobile body of hers, while Kit's mother behaved like an amiable dowager. Mr. Sykes seemed somehow shy of Kit, and trailed his bored experiences through a series of night-clubs, and since Kit knew nothing of night clubs his eloquence was limited.

Afterwards they went up to the ball-room and danced. Kit found Lola on his bosom. She seemed to have flung herself at him and arrived there with one of those rapid