Free Encounters: stories by Elizabeth Bowen, Robarts - University of Toronto

all,"said Marcia,"there are egoists and egoists. You are one sort of egoist, I am the other."
    A ladybird had dropped on to her plate from a cluster of leaves above, and she invited it on to her finger and transferred it very carefully to the rail of the verandah.
    "Differentiate,"said the stranger, watching the progress of the ladybird.
    They were lunching on the verandah, and the midday sun fell through a screen of leaves in quivering splashes on to the tablecloth, the elusive pattern of Marcia's dress, the crude enamelled brilliance of the salad in a willow-pattern bowl, the dinted plate and cutlery slanting together at angles of confusion. The water was spring water, so cold that a mist had formed on the sides of their tumblers and of the red glass water-jug. They considered helpings of cold lamb, and their heads and faces were in shadow.
    Through the open window the interior of the coffee-room was murky and repellent; with its drab, dishevelled tables, and chairs

    so huddled tete-d-tete that they travestied intimacy. It was full of the musty reek of cruets and the wraiths of long-digested meals, and of a brooding reproach for their desertion whenever they turned their heads towards it. A mournful waitress, too, reproached them, flicking desultorily about among the crumbs.
    From under the verandah the hotel garden slanted steeply down to the road; the burning dustiness beneath them was visible in glimpses between the branches of the lime-trees. Cyclists flashed past, and an occasional motor whirled up clouds of dust to settle in the patient limes. Behind their screen of leaves they two sat sheltered and conversant, looking out to where, beyond the village, the country fell away into the hot blue distances of June, and cooled by a faint wind that crept towards them through a rustle and glitter of leaves from hay-fields and the heavy shade of elders.
    The jewels flashed in Marcia's rings as she laid down knife and fork, and, drumming with her fingers on the table, proceeded to expatiate on egoists.

    "Don't think I'm going to be clever,"she implored him,"and talk like a woman in a Meredith book. Well, quite baldly to begin with, one acknowledges that one puts oneself first, doesn't one? There may be other people, but it's ourselves that matter."
    He had relaxed his face to a calm atten-tiveness, and, leaning limply back in his chair, looked at her with tired, kindly eyes, like the eyes of a monkey, between wrinkled lids.
    "Granted, if you wish it for the sake of argument. But"
    "But you are protesting inwardly that the other people matter more? They do matter enormously. But the more they matter to you, still the more you're mattering to yourself; it merely raises your standard of values. Have you any children?"
    "Six,"said the tired man.
    "I have three,"said Marcia."And a husband. Quite enough, but I am very fond of them all. That is why I am always so glad to get away from them."
    He was cutting his lamb with quiet slashing strokes of his knife, and eating quickly and abstractedly, like a man whose habits of

    life have made food less an indulgence than a necessity. She believed that she was interesting him.
    "My idea in life, my particular form of egoism, is a determination not to be swamped. I resent most fearfully, not the claims my family make on me, but the claims I make on my family. Theirs are a tribute to my indispensability, mine, a proof of my dependence. Therefore I am a perfectly charming woman, but quite extraordinarily selfish. That is how all my friends describe me. I admire their candour, but I never congratulate them on their perspicacity. My egoism is nothing if not blatant and unblushing.
    "Now you go on!"she said encouragingly, helping herself to salad."Tell me about your selfishness, then I'll define how it's diflFerent from mine."
    He did not appear inspired.
    "Yours is a much better kind,"she supplemented."Finer. You have given up everything but the thing that won't be given up. In fact, there's