The Red and The Green Part 3

'You do so.'

'I do not.'

Chapter Four.

Over and over, like a mighty sea, Comes the love of JESUS, rolling over me!

Several hundred youthful voices pealed it forth enthusiastically as Andrew and his mother went with quickened step and stiffened gait past the big marquee. A large red banner above it read Children's Special Service Mission, and Saved by the Blood of the Lamb. Neither Andrew nor his mother referred to the phenomenon. They were on their way to visit Aunt Millicent. 'You really must fix things up properly with Frances, after all it's up to you,' said Hilda, as they began to pa.s.s out of range.

Once I was blind, now I can see, Once I was bound, but now I am free, And that's how I KNOW there's a Saviour for me- OH such a Saviour!

Andrew reflected, as the horrible sounds died away, that in Ireland religion was a matter of choosing between one appalling vulgarity and another. Wondering which he would vote for if he had to choose, he concluded sadly that of course he would have to be with the young people in the marquee and their boisterous mentors. 'Yes,' he said absently.

At the moment Andrew could think of nothing else but Pat Dumay. He regretted everything about yesterday's scene. He felt he had cut a rotten figure. He had failed to protect Frances from a sort of grossness in the atmosphere. He had construed her rus.h.i.+ng off with Uncle Barnabas as a reproach to himself. He had helplessly witnessed his uncle playing the buffoon. And worst of all he had allowed himself to be provoked into taunting Pat. He had scarcely troubled to formulate any intention or resolution about this beforehand, so impossible had it seemed that he should affront his cousin. It had been for Andrew an axiom that Pat was a little larger than life and far too dignified and authoritative to be in any way goaded or jeered at. Such behaviour would only belittle the jeerer; as he now felt himself belittled. More than this, he felt an acute regret, almost a sentimental pain, to think that he had probably ruined his chances of becoming Pat's friend. He now realized, inordinately, surprisingly upset by the incident, that so far from being 'liberated' from his uncomfortable interest in his cousin, he had returned to Ireland with the ardent hope of being treated as his equal, of winning his respect and even his affection. Yesterday's encounter had been very important to him and now that it had misfired he was left with an emotional problem. He had hardly been able to bring himself to leave the house, he could not remember whether he had said goodbye to Aunt Kathleen, and he would certainly have attempted some reconciliation scene then and there, had not the maddening Cathal been standing by.

'After all, Frances wants a formal proposal, any girl does,' Hilda was going on. 'It's a great moment in one's life. She'll want to be able to remember it later on. It is really time there was an announcement. And you must do something about a ring. It isn't fair to other young men, and now that Frances is going more into society you don't want to land her in difficulties.'

With an effort Andrew switched his attention to Frances. Yes, he really must get Frances fixed up. And of course, yes, a great moment. My dearest Frances, I have something of very great importance to ask you. I wonder if you can at all guess what it is? Indeed, dear Andrew, I cannot conjecture. You will have to tell me. I wish you to do me the honour of becoming my wife. 'You are quite right, Mama,' he said.

'I do hope Christopher will be on time. I saw him this morning at Bewley's in Grafton Street and he swore he'd come. It's such a job to get him round to Millie's. I do find your aunt rather a strain and I know he does too. Thank heavens it's stopped raining, so perhaps he'll wait for us outside. You say everything looked just the same at Blessington Street? I really must get round there and see the boys, Kathleen keeps pestering me. I am surprised she does not re-do her drawing-room. She could easily afford it, and it must look so shabby and old-fas.h.i.+oned now.'

'It looked exactly as I always remember it.'

It was a room that receded into his earliest childhood like a long dirty corridor, always twilit, stuffy, melancholy, vaguely menacing. And yet perhaps it was not quite the same, or rather he himself had changed. He recalled seeing yesterday, as he checked the ma.s.sy drifts of furniture and the myriad objects still rooted in their old places, an oriental table with innumerable pieces of gla.s.s set into its gilded legs. He remembered this, which had once seemed to him an object of exotic beauty; it now looked as his mother would see it, tawdry, vulgar. Some glory had gone from the room, something which at least it had had which resembled beauty. The presence of the big crucifix, which had formerly seemed both thrilling and alarming, now just seemed a piece of rotten bad form, characteristic of the particular undiscriminating muddle in which his aunt and uncle lived. Well, well, he would take Frances to England, away from all this. Yes, Andrew, she whispered gratefully, yes, yes. Her little hand sought his, and as he drew her to his breast he could feel the violent beating of her heart.

'Ah, there's Christopher waiting outside, bless him, wearing that comical mackintosh hat. h.e.l.lo, Christopher, we were hoping you would be punctual. Oh, before I forget, Kathleen was at Claresville just after luncheon and said she'd looked for you at Finglas and there was something special she wanted to see you about.'

Christopher seemed a little depressed by this news. 'What have I done now? Did she say what it was? Was she upset?'

'No, she didn't say. She wasn't upset. You know Kathleen's never exactly bright and gay. I shouldn't think it's important, so don't worry.'

'Ah well. Once more into the breach, dear friends.'

Aunt Millicent's town house was what Hilda called 'one of the better cla.s.s houses' of Dublin. It was a 'double-fronted' house in Upper Mount Street, several times wider than the house in Blessington Street, but otherwise not unlike it in structure. In the watery sunlight the brick facades of Upper Mount Street glowed a rusty pink and yellow, only Millie's house, together with one or two others, had been washed over with a powdery red preparation, currently fas.h.i.+onable, and the interstices between the bricks outlined in black. The sagging steps up to the door were immaculately reddened to match. Beneath its magisterial fanlight the door was a radiant newly painted rose pink, its bra.s.s knocker, shaped like a fish, polished as softly bright and smooth as Saint Peter's toe; while at each gleaming window a heavy froth of lace curtain was symmetrically looped back. Just beyond, at the end of the street, the elegant green dome of Saint Stephen's, Church of Ireland, rose into the lucid blue sky. Long green coppery streaks trailed down the light grey stone of the tower and fingered the clock which was just now striking four. Its particular high cracked tone struck with a melancholy authority upon the heart of Andrew, recalling to him the church's rational empty interior where he had sometimes wors.h.i.+pped as a child, if partic.i.p.ation in those calm, prosaic rites could be called wors.h.i.+p.

A maid with long white streamers depending from her cap informed them that her ladys.h.i.+p was out in the garden. As they pa.s.sed through the dark belly of the house Andrew tried to revive his memories of it. But it was many years since he had been there, and the rooms seemed unfamiliar. He glimpsed great mahogany surfaces gleaming like black mirrors in twilit interiors. There was a vernal smell of furniture polish.

The garden was more fresh in memory. He recognized, though he could not have pictured it beforehand, the wide terrace of slightly reddish paving stones, with its intermittent clumps of iris and rosemary and rue, and its square fish-pool, the brown beech hedge beyond, still clothed in its crisp twirled winter leaf.a.ge, and the little lawn with the propped-up mulberry tree. The scene was wet and glistening, the paving stones reflecting hints of light and form, the mulberry tree dripping. Then suddenly the sun became brighter and a light seemed switched on in the garden. The great hump of the mulberry tree glowed into a golden green. Aunt Millicent came through the gap in the hedge.

Andrew felt a perceptible pleasurable very rapid shock as if a needle had pa.s.sed right through his body without hurting him. It was many years since he had seen his aunt, and although he retained intact, like old snapshots, some attractive memories of her, these had been gradually overlaid by his mother's continual though vague remarks about Millie being so 'tiresome', or being about to 'go to pieces', a fate which was for some reason persistently foreseen by her sister-in-law. These prognostications, together with the reports of hunting, cigar-smoking, pistol shots and trousers, had made him, without reflection, expect something slightly, by this time, gaunt and sourly tweedy, something a little weatherbeaten, smelling of tobacco and even of whiskey, although drink had not in fact figured so far in his mother's denunciations. What confronted him now was a plump youngish woman with a radiantly smiling face, elegantly dressed in a tight-skirted slightly old-fas.h.i.+oned mode, and positively, oh very positively, pretty.

'Oh, h.e.l.lo my dears', shouted Millie across the terrace, You've come! Oh, goody!' She swept up to Hilda and began kissing her. 'h.e.l.lo Christopher. Glad to see you, you old stranger. I absolutely adore your hat. And this is the golden-haired soldier boy! My, doesn't he look fine! I can remember him when he wasn't interested in anything but farthing lucky-bags. Can you remember those farthing lucky-bags, Andrew? Many a penny you begged off me for them, to get them at Nolan's shop. But I mustn't remind you of that now, must I? Why, I think he's blus.h.i.+ng, the pet!'

Andrew, smiling rather stiffly, felt he had gained a little insight after all into what his mother meant by 'tiresomeness'.

'It's very nice to see you, Millie,' said Hilda. 'You seem to be keeping well. We had such a pleasant walk here. Merrion Square is looking lovely, with the lilac and the laburnum all ready to flower. And I'm glad to say the rain seems to have given up at last.'

'Oh yes, and I thought we'd have tea in the garden,' said Millie. 'Wouldn't that be fun? I haven't done it yet this year.'

'Won't it be a bit wet and cold for tea in the garden?' said Hilda, not concealing her displeasure.

'I'll lend you all woolly shawls from Connemara. I've just got some new ones and they're such pretty colours. And as for a little wet, sure I don't mind it, and you won't either when you've been over here a bit longer. One's getting oneself wet all the time in Ireland, isn't that so, Christopher? Sure I don't mind it at all.'

This appeared to be true, as Andrew observed that his aunt's high-necked dress of dove-grey silk, which with the enthusiastic gesturing that accompanied her words constantly swirled against the low bushes, was darkened with water and even muddied all round the lower hem. He also noticed as she swayed the rather old-fas.h.i.+oned flounced bustle effect at the back, unless it was indeed perhaps Aunt Millicent's shape. He looked elsewhere.

'Well, I think we shall be cold,' said Hilda firmly. She seemed to have decided it was a matter of principle to show the flag to her sister-in-law straight away.

'The sun's s.h.i.+ning and it'll be dry directly,' Millie went on inconsequently, 'Wouldn't you like to walk down the garden? The little brick path is a dry way.'

'How's the camellia?' said Christopher.

'Oh, but it's in flower, it's a sight. You take Hilda down to the greenhouse to see the camellia and young Andrew shall stay here and help me with the tea things.'

Christopher led Hilda away. The murmur of her protests could be heard receding beyond the hedge.

'Aren't they a well-matched couple?' said Millie, looking after them. Then she laughed. 'Well now, young Andrew, come and sit down and let me look at you.'

She drew him to a wooden seat and they sat down. The long twisting branches of rosemary swept the pavement at their feet. The seat was extremely wet, as Andrew instantly realized. The dove-grey silk took the matter in its stride.

Millie sat for a moment staring at him, and he, half annoyed, half amused, returned her stare. She was not perhaps as handsome as she had seemed at first sight. Her complexion was rather coa.r.s.e and her mouth too large. She had big dark brown eyes which she continually narrowed, perhaps because she was short-sighted. Her reddish brown hair, to which a fine and scarcely perceptible scattering of grey gave a metallic patina, was much plaited and entwined. Two small ears held their own against it, adorned with bright blue lapis lazuli earrings. After having been a very laughing face, it was now a very serious face. It compelled Andrew, and only after he had been looking into her eyes in silence for half a minute did he realize how unusual this proceeding was.

'Yes,' she said. 'You are like him. I could never really see it before.'

'Like-?'

'Like your father. You are really very like him now.'

'I'm glad-,' said Andrew lamely. The scrutiny now embarra.s.sed him, and he averted his eyes.

'I wonder if you remember a picnic at Howth-well, why should you, you were very young. Tell me about yourself. So you were in France, but not for long, you got pneumonia, and you're still on sick leave?'

Andrew was a bit surprised and flattered at this knowledge of his lot. 'Yes. I'm afraid I haven't seen much action yet.'

'Don't worry,' said Millie. 'This old war is going to last quite a while. You'll have plenty of time to behave with reckless courage on some battlefield.'

'I hope so.'

'Well, you're a fool to hope so. I really think one should be a pacifist. I'm sure they could all make peace now if they tried. But what with the wicked old men and the silly young ones- it's about time women had the vote. Are you political?'

Andrew was not sure how serious she was. He answered lightly. 'I don't understand much about politics. I'm leaving that for later.'

'I think we should all be political nowadays. I say, my bottom says it's wet, what does yours say? Let's walk about a bit, take a turn, as your mother would say.'

She jumped up, and as she did so swept her hand along one of the rosemary branches collecting the small narrow leaves in her palm. A delicious musty fragrance arose which almost made Andrew sneeze.

'I love things with grey leaves, don't you? Well, rosemary hasn't actually got grey leaves, or rather they're only grey underneath, but that was the idea of this garden, and the rue has, and that stuff called trimalchio or whatever it is. There-' As she took his arm she strewed the leaves of the rosemary over his khaki sleeve.

'That's for remembrance. And rue-what is rue for, I forget?'

'For sorrow, I suppose,' said Andrew.

'Such a pretty plant. Well, sorrow we shall all have, especially you as you are so young. I keep thinking I have grown out of sorrow, but it keeps coming back. Don't worry about the tea, Maudie will lay it inside whatever I say, and I declare I think it's going to rain again after all. Come and see my fish.'

She released him, and moved to the other side of the little fish-pool, regarding him across it. The brown surface of the pool quivered a little at their feet, perhaps with some preliminary drops of rain. The sky behind Millie was now a bright hazy yellow.

Andrew stared at his aunt across the pool. The blue earrings glowed in the dark convoluted hair.

She murmured, 'Yes, you are confoundedly like your da. What are you thinking at this moment?'

Andrew framed in his mind the sentence, How beautiful your earrings are, Aunt Millicent. He said, 'How beautiful you are, Aunt Millicent.'

There was a second's silence before Millie's loud laugh. 'Why, you naughty boy, are you flirting? And you engaged to the dearest girl in the world! Well, you must bring her to see me. You must come to tea next Thursday at Rathblane, the pair of you. And next Thursday, but not before, you shall call me Millie.'

She knelt down on the pavement beside the pool. Andrew knelt too, embarra.s.sed at what he had so unaccountably said, but also, unaccountably, feeling rather pleased with himself. He pretended to be investigating the fish.

As he looked down into the dense brown vegetable depths of the pool something suddenly flashed past him. There was a glint of blue and a splash and a receding sinking glimmer. 'Dear me,' said Millie. 'One of my earrings has gone west.'

With an exclamation of distress Andrew peered down into the pool where the earring had completely disappeared from view, and his first instinctive idea was that it was lost forever. He looked up at Millie and found her regarding him coolly, her eyebrows slightly raised. She seemed unmoved by the incident and only interested in what he would do.

'Of course,' said Andrew, as if laboriously working it out, 'the pool's not very deep, is it? I'll get it for you'. His hand broke the surface of the warm water. He hesitated. Rather awkwardly he removed his watch and put it in his pocket and then began to take off his jacket. Millie stared at him. He folded the jacket and then could not think what to do with it, being unwilling to lay it on the wet pavement, until Millie reached out and took it from him in silence. He rolled up one sleeve of his s.h.i.+rt to the shoulder and loosened his tie and undid the s.h.i.+rt at the neck where it was a little tight. These preparations seemed to take a ludicrously long time. He plunged his arm into the pool up to the elbow, deeper, without touching bottom. A pale oval, the reflection of Millie's face, danced disjointedly on the disturbed surface. Andrew lay down full length upon the pavement. As the water lapped at his shoulder his hand explored the soft sludgy bottom. He touched something hard, and the next moment had fished up the earring. He handed it quickly to his aunt and they both rose.

Andrew felt distressed and discomfited by the incident, chiefly, as he now confusedly felt, because he had paused to take his jacket off; and yet it would have been idiotic to plunge his arm in without doing so. He quickly resumed his jacket. He coughed and began to brush down his breeches to which a greenish slime from the pavement adhered in streaks. He was beginning to feel annoyed and put in the wrong.

'Andrew,' said Aunt Millicent.

He straightened up to look at her. At once with a quick gesture she dropped the earring down inside the front of his s.h.i.+rt. A second later Hilda and Christopher appeared through the gap in the hedge. The terrace rang with Millie's unexplained laughter. It began to pour with rain.

Chapter Five.

'I THOUGHT they'd never go,' said Christopher.

'How did you give them the slip?'

'I said I was going into town.'

'You don't think Aunt Hilda suspects?'

'Darling, Hilda knows nothing.'

'Did she say anything special?'

'Only that it was just like you to want to have tea in the garden. I must say I agree!'

'But that was on purpose,' said Millie. 'I thought if we were all s.h.i.+vering out on the terrace they'd go all the sooner!'

'So you're not as f.e.c.kless as I thought. A shrewd calculating person lives inside you.'

'Well, not really. I only invented the reason afterwards.'

'Whatever did you do to young Andrew, by the way? You must have bewitched him. He said practically nothing all through tea and just fumbled with the neck of his s.h.i.+rt.'

Millie laughed. 'Oh, I did something to embarra.s.s him. Never mind what. He is so touchingly like his father, one can't help teasing him. Do you fancy him as a son-in-law?'

'He's all right. He's not as intelligent as Frances, but he's got sense and a very sweet nature. And they know each other very well and love each other.'

'Love-ah well-'

'Ah well, indeed.'

This conversation was taking place in a long upper room, originally a billiard room, which Millie used as a combination of personal boudoir and shooting gallery. The combination of these two atmospheres unnerved, and doubtless was intended to unnerve, Millie's friends. The room was thickly carpeted and at the near end, by the door, looking obscurely ecclesiastical, stood a low white dressing-table with a tall mirror surmounted by a large lace canopy not unlike those which are held above the Host in religious processions. A plump pink stool, gathered in to a waist-line of silken roses, was placed before the mirror which was flanked by a pair of gilded candlesticks containing candles, unlit at the moment. All round about was a cl.u.s.ter of extremely comfortable satin-covered armchairs, all facing the mirror, placed as if for some ceremony at which Millie would adorn herself or possibly undress before an admiring audience. This ceremony, as far as Christopher knew, never took place, nor did he suppose, though he had never investigated, that the jars of Waterford gla.s.s on the dressing-table actually contained cosmetics. They were more likely to contain liqueurs. As far as he knew: for sometimes for a fleeting moment he had the suspicion that Millie led some secret life where, with other recondite suitors, she proceeded to lengths of which he never dreamed. But in fact that was impossible; he knew all about Millie: and even if he lacked, certainly no one else enjoyed, the ultimate privileges.

The wall at the far end of the room, faced with wood and pitted with revolver fire, was bare except for the row of targets at which, standing among the satiny chairs, Millie took aim with her small nickel-plated revolver. The side walls, lined with a furry green vegetational wallpaper, were thickly covered with tolerably good oil paintings of members of the Kinnard family. At these, with suitably pugnacious exclamations, Millie often pointed her weapon, but had only once loosed off a bullet in their direction, which happily lodged in a frame. Christopher disliked these sports. He hated the noise and the horrible sensation of the impact. Millie, armed, cut a pretty figure. But he took the menace of it painfully to himself.

Although it was still light outside, Millie had pulled the curtains and lit the gas, and the fierce bright mantles purred along the room under their red ta.s.selled shades. During the time in which Christopher had been engaged in 'giving the slip' to Andrew and Hilda, she had changed out of the tight grey dress into a looser shorter dress of purple crepe-de-chine, rather oriental in appearance. She kept nudging the skirt of it against her leg as she stood, as if unused to the length, while she played absently with the revolver, spinning the barrel fast and then stopping it abruptly with her finger. Christopher, outstretched in one of the armchairs, watched her with exasperation, fascination, adoration and fear.

'You know, Christopher, when you play Russian roulette it isn't really dangerous because the weight of the bullet always pulls the loaded chamber down to the bottom.'

'I have no intention of playing Russian roulette. You are quite breath-taking enough as a pastime. Don't change the subject, my darling.'

The process of falling in love with Millie had, for Christopher, taken place over quite a long period. Yet there had never been any moment when he had both understood clearly what he was doing and been still able to control it. At moments of control he had not understood, and at moments of understanding he had been helpless. He sometimes told himself that if he could have prevented this thing from happening he would have done so. He knew, now, what Millie did, but he did not know what Millie thought, and he feared, coming upon them suddenly, certain blank moments of ruthlessness in her. Yet even the process of coveting Millie, at first as it had seemed so vainly, had renewed the world for him, and in her light he had seen every flower, every leaf, every bird designed with a wiry clarity and plumped out with a celestial untainted colour.

When Christopher had first met Millie, at a time when he himself was courting Heather Kinnard, she was already married to Arthur. He had disliked her, chiefly, as it seemed in retrospect, because she had tended to put Heather in the shade. Yet Heather had adored her dominating sister-in-law and defended her heartily against Christopher's criticisms. He had thought Millie loud, vulgar and thoroughly selfish. He still thought her loud, vulgar and thoroughly selfish, only now these things were meat and drink to him; or rather, he saw her faults with a difference, touched by romance into gaiety and by charity into innocence. Kathleen, whose conceptual armoury did not include the idea of vulgarity, disliked and indeed feared in Millie a merciless rapacity upon which she blamed Arthur's early death. Kathleen once said of Millie, 'She respects no one. She does not see where another person begins.' But Heather enjoyed Millie's flamboyance, her noise. This paler, frailer quieter soul took from her boisterous sister-in-law the reflection of a more abundant life. Perhaps, Christopher had often felt, Arthur's att.i.tude to Millie was of this kind too. He had enjoyed being digested by this larger organism. And it also occurred to Christopher to wonder: had he himself similarly engulfed Heather? Was he able to 'see where another person begins'? No one had seemed to blame him for the way in which Heather had faded from life. Yet perhaps something in himself, less noisy, less overtly colourful, but just as ruthlessly and largely egotistic, had thrust aside that gentler, weaker spirit. But of course these were strictly irrational speculations. Heather had died from a disease of the liver and Arthur from cancer of the stomach. Science proclaimed their deaths normal, unavoidable.

Perhaps, in the long run, it was some deep sense of identification with his sister-in-law, some feeling of the similarity of their temperaments, of a profound likeness underneath a superficial unlikeness, which had made Christopher so interested. Arthur's demise had preceded Heather's by some eighteen months, and at the time of these deaths Christopher's dislike of Millie had been at a maximum: possibly because he felt himself a.s.sociated with her in some kind of guilty pact. All the same, she had by now become an object of speculation, irritation, fascination. Perhaps too he had in a way learnt from Heather to regard Millie as one of the world's more significant objects. When her name came up in conversation he would jump and listen nervously, and when she was present he was always unusually argumentative. Then one day she asked him to lend her some money.

That was now about eight years ago. It had been a significant moment and Christopher had felt it to be such at the time. It had been, for him, the first indication that all was not well with Millie's finances. She lived extremely lavishly and it had been and still was confidently a.s.sumed by the world at large that Millie Kinnard was 'pretty well heeled'. Christopher was surprised, interested, and in a prophetic way curiously pleased to find that this was not so. He lent her the money at once, without comment, happy to be, and happy to be tacitly expected to be, supremely discreet. She was grateful, he was politely, reticently dignified; and at once their relations.h.i.+p was altered. Christopher's money had come to him from his father, who had been a teacher of mathematics at Trinity, an amateur economist and an expert gambler on the Stock Exchange; which expertize had augmented an already comfortable family fortune. Christopher himself was neither rapacious nor mean and had not inherited his father's taste for playing with money. Yet money was important to him, its presence was a deep source of security, and it was somehow a stuff through which he was vitally connected with the world. A part of his life-blood ran through it. And when he became financially connected with Millie some warmth pa.s.sed from him to her with the connection. It was this primitive touching, more even perhaps than the more obvious sense of a power over her, which made him begin to fall in love.

But of course these explanations, upon which he himself later meditated, were in a way otiose. Millie was a gorgeous desirable object. He wondered why all men were not in love with her, and soon began to suspect that they were. She was an overflowing vessel, a plump, gay, generous woman. There was some coldness, some s.h.i.+vering, shrewd thinness in Christopher which needed her desperately, which clung to her as to a source of warmth and life. He only half concealed his need, watching her with a large affectation of detachment, and enraptured by the cool amused gaze which, in the formality of their new relations.h.i.+p, she with equal affectation adopted. He remembered how, in the old quarrelling days, Millie would sometimes shout out, 'But I adore Christopher!' Now, as their poker-faced relation gradually broke down into tenderness and laughter, he realized that Millie was not only grateful, she was prepared in effect to adore him. This made Christopher very happy indeed.

Time pa.s.sed, and Millie's affairs became more involved and difficult. Christopher lent her more money. He gave her advice too, but he was a prudent rather than an original capitalist and an ineffective helper. Millie took advice in other quarters, without revealing the seriousness of the situation, and merely increased the muddle she was in. She was incapable of economies. Christopher watched these developments with mixed feelings, and gradually an idea which seemed to him both sinister and delightful formulated itself in his mind. Millie's difficulty would be Christopher's opportunity.

That he might ever ask Millie to marry him was a notion which, after he had fallen in love with her, he had early dismissed. He wanted to be happy, to enjoy the deliciousness of her company, not to ask too much; and it seemed clear that she could not possibly want to marry him. She was a spoilt girl, he was not by any means her only admirer, and she ostentatiously enjoyed her freedom. She 'adored' him, but she was not in the least in love with him. 'Adoration' was something different. Millie skipped about, bounded like a dog, shouted more than usual when Christopher arrived. But she let him depart without repining. She liked the intermittent character of their converse. He would have wished to be with her day and night. He coveted her body with a pa.s.sion which his shrewd hedonism constantly quieted and checked. He did not care, at his age, to suffer the sleepless nights of unsatisfied desire, and he did not in fact suffer them. But he wanted Millie; and he knew that she did not, in that way, want him.