She looked at him now across the breakfast-table; his red cheeks, his great nostrils “like a horse’s,” his enormous hands, but it was not all hostility the look that she gave him. There was a kind of dawning wonder and surprise.
They had their table by the window, and the sun beat through on to the silver teapot and the ham and eggs. Annie had refused porridge. No, she wasn’t hungry.
“You should have bathed, as I did, before breakfast,” said Maradick.
So he’d bathed before breakfast, had he? She looked across at him smiling.
“Yes, I slept badly.” They were down again, those blinds! She saw him drop them down as though by magic. He was playing his game.
“Well, next time you must wake me and I’ll come too,” she said. His sense of humour was touched at the idea of her coming down at five in the morning, but he said nothing.
The knowledge, the increasing certainty that there was something in it all, was choking her so that she found it exceedingly difficult to eat. But that she should be baffled by James was so incredible an idea that she concealed her rising temper.
She nodded gaily at Mrs. Lawrence, who swam towards their table with outstretched hands and a blue scarf floating like wings behind her.
“But you generally have it upstairs, I thought . . .”
“Yes, I know; but _such_ a day, one couldn’t really . . .”
“Yes, I was awake ever so . . . But James has been bathing. No, Lucy, sit still, dear, until we’ve finished. Bathing before breakfast. I think I really must to-morrow.”
She was extremely nice to him throughout the meal, and even hinted at their doing something, spending the day, “and _such_ a day.” It was a shame not to take advantage of the weather “as a family.” Quite a new idea, indeed, but he accepted it, and even began to suggest possible places. She was baffled again, and, as the terrible prospect of a whole day spent in James’s company, quite alone except for the girls, pressed about her, became almost hysterical in her hurriedly discovered reasons why, after all, it would never do. But he smiled at her, and although he was quite ready to do anything that she might suggest, it was a different kind of agreeing from a week or two ago.
She retired from the breakfast-table baffled.