Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/319

 very graceful long window. The end of the room looked all window, and filled with the pleasant smoothness of an old lawn and the further gloom of a cedar.

"Mr. Sorrell."

Christopher Icoked at Pentreath's wife. She was a fair young woman, tall, with dark eyes, a little Roman nose and a decisive mouth, a beauty, an immediate beauty, but less subtly so when you inhaled the faint, cold perfume of her perfection. She smiled faintly at Kit; it was like turning on a pale light and turning it off again. She did not say that she was pleased to see him. Why should she be pleased?

Such was Perdita Pentreath.

"Maurice has been called out. I don't think he will be very long."

She resumed her place on the sofa. She enthroned herself against the greens of grass and cedar, while Kit sat down very carefully on a chair, and felt that a certain brightness was necessary.

"What a very charming window," he said.

She surveyed him with veiled attention, as though he had surprised her, and she did not permit people to surprise her. She had a beautifully cold presence, the perfect composure of some white flower, manners that were serenely detached. A most exquisite egoist.

"Yes, it is particularly right. The house was my father's wedding present."

"A very delightful one."

He felt himself completely in the circle of her cold consciousness, a figure out of the past, her husband's past, to be observed and considered with courteous hostility. And Kit was thinking— "So this is Maurice's wife! Arthur's Guinevere. What a reaction from the other. She looks as though she had buried something and had planted herself like a lily over the grave. I wonder." But he kept on talking with a genial glibness, feeling that she regarded him as part of Pentreath's past, and that she utterly disapproved of it, and would hold it crystallized in ice.

And then Pentreath came in with an uneasy brightness, and shook hands with Kit, and looked anxiously at his wife. It became obvious to Christopher that Pentreath was very much in love with his wife, and afraid of her.