‘How can you ask me that, can’t you see?’ he exclaimed in torture.

‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘even if I couldn’t see, it wouldn’t, would it – now I have accepted you – be really a fair thing to ask?’

Mrs Lee-Mittison, coming cautiously through the garden gate of the villa where she (such a pleasant introduction!) had been calling, stood back a long time between the gate-posts, a corner of her card-case pressed against her lips, to watch them down the road.

‘Such a little slip of a thing … I don’t think she understands,’ said Mrs Lee-Mittison.

19

Tea-Garden

DR LAWRENCE TALKED OF taking his daughters away from the Hotel. ‘I quite agree,’ he had said, looking at Victor distastefully, ‘that my daughter Veronica must marry somebody; but I fail to see any reason why she should marry you.’ This had seemed an unnecessarily disagreeable way of putting things. Dr Lawrence wore yellow spectacles out of doors, where the interview had been taking place; these gave him the advantage of looking sinister. An abrupt man, Victor thought, not at all the sort of person one would care to consult if one needed to visit a heart specialist. In spite of all the tennis and dancing Victor was beginning to put on flesh out here; he felt that Dr Lawrence had noticed this; he had just borrowed twenty pounds from his father and this he felt that Dr Lawrence knew. It had all been rather awkward. Veronica did what she could; she admitted to Victor that her father was a bit of a beast, and to her father that Victor was a bit of an idiot, then retired to bed for two days, announcing that she had a bad headache. Dr Lawrence entered into correspondence with some hotels on the French Riviera, but they were full up: the affair hung fire.

‘Our father,’ Eileen Lawrence told Colonel Duperrier, ‘has got a devastating way of taking the starch out of things for us. We often fear that we shall die unmarried.’

‘Oh … surely?’ Colonel Duperrier was much concerned. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that girls could do pretty much what they want to nowadays. I should have thought any of you could.’ He was entertaining Veronica’s sisters, after tennis, at the English tea-gardens; they sat together in a triangle round a small expectant table under a lemon tree. The declining sun made the girls’ arms and faces coral-pink and their dresses gold; Colonel Duperrier regretted more than ever that he had no nieces.