Page:The Painted Veil - Maugham - 1925.djvu/257

 HEY went in to luncheon. Charlie, sitting at the head of his table, easily took charge of the conversation. After those first few words of sympathy he treated Kitty, not as though she had just suffered a devastating experience, but rather as though she had come in from Shanghai for a change after an operation for appendicitis. She needed cheering and he was prepared to cheer her. The best way of making her feel at home was to treat her as one of the family. He was a tactful man. He began talking of the autumn race meeting, and the polo—by Jove, he would have to give up playing polo if he couldn’t get his weight down—and a chat he had had that morning with the Governor. He spoke of a party they had been to on the Admiral’s flag-ship, the state of affairs in Canton, and of the links at Kowloon. In a few minutes Kitty felt that she might have been away for no longer than a week-end. It was incredible that over there, up country, six hundred miles away only (the distance from London to Edinburgh, wasn’t it?) men, women and children had been dying like flies. Soon she found herself asking about so and so who had broken a collar bone at polo and if Mrs. This had gone home or Mrs. That was playing in the tennis tournament. Charlie made his little jokes and she smiled at them. Dorothy with her faint air of superiority (which now included Kitty and so was no longer slightly offensive, but a bond of union