He found his book, and stood there for a moment wondering why he liked the place so much. He had never been a man of any imagination, but now, vaguely, he filled the space around him with figures. He could not analyse his thoughts at all, but he knew that it all meant something to him now, something that had not been there a week ago.
The drawing-room was lying in shadow; the light and heat were shut out by heavy curtains. His wife was making tea, and as he came in at the door he realised her daintiness and charm very vividly. The shining silver and delicate china suited her, and there were little touches of very light blue about her white dress that were vague enough to seem accidental; you wondered why they had happened to be so exactly in precisely the right places. There were also there Lady and Sir Richard Gale, Alice Du Cane, Mrs. Lawrence, and in the background with a diminutive kitten, Tony.
“Something to eat, Miss Du Cane? What, nothing, really?” He sat down beside her and Tony. She interested him, partly because she was so beautiful and partly because she was perhaps going to marry Tony. She looked very cool now; a little too cool, he thought.
“I? Oh yes! It’s lovely, of course. But I think it would be better if one had a cottage here, quite quietly. Of course the hotel’s beautiful and most awfully comfortable, but it’s the kind of place where one oughtn’t to have to think of more than the place; it’s worth it. All the other things—dressing and thinking what you look like, and _table d’hôte_—they all come in between somehow like a wall. One doesn’t want anything but the place.”
_That_, he suddenly discovered, was why he liked the little room upstairs, because it was, so simply and clearly, the place. He looked at her gratefully.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s just what I’ve been feeling. I missed it last year somehow. It didn’t seem fine in quite the same way.”
But he saw that she was not really interested. She thought of him, of course, as a kind of middle-aged banker. He expected that she would soon try to talk to him about self and the _table d’hôte_ and bridge. He was seriously anxious to show her that there were other things that he cared for.
“You’ve changed a lot since the other day, Alice,” said Tony suddenly. “You told me you didn’t like Treliss a bit, and now you think it’s lovely.”