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

written a book, but"
    He flushed."I am not a—an influential member of the firm."
    "Oh, then, p'raps you couldn't. Tell me, why did you come here to-day? I mean why here specially?"

    "Oh, for no reason. Just at random. Why did you?"
    "To meet somebody who hasn't turned up. He was going to have brought a lunch-basket and we were to have picnicked down by the river. Oh, nobody I shouldn't meet. You haven't blundered into an elopement. I've got no brain for intrigue. After lunch we were going to have sketched—at least, he would have sketched and I should have talked. He's by way of teaching me. We were to have met at twelve, but I suppose he's forgotten or is doing something else. Probably he wired, but it hadn't come before I started."
    "Do you paint?"
    "I've got a paint-box."She indicated a diminutive Windsor and Newton and a large water-colour block lying at her feet.
    "I'm sorry,"he said diffidently."I'm afraid this must be something of a disappointment."
    "Not a bit."She clasped her hands on the table, leaning forward."I've really loved our lunch-party. You listened. I've met very few people who could really listen."

    "I've met very few people who were worth Hstening to."
    She raised her brows. Her shabby man was growing gallant.
    "I am certain,"she smiled,"that with your delicate perceptions of the romantic you would rather we remained incognito. Names and addresses are"
    "Banality."
    The leaves rustled and her muslins fluttered in a breath of warm wind. In silence they turned their faces out towards the distance.
    "I love views,"she said,"when there isn't anything to understand in them. There are no subtleties of emotion about June. She's so gloriously elemental. Not a month for self-justification, simply for self-abandonment."
    He turned towards her quickly, his whole face flushed and lighted up for speech.
    With a grind and screech of brakes a big car drew up under the lime-trees.
    Marcia leaned over the verandah rail.
    "Ah,"she cried."Oh, John!"
    She reached out for her parasol and dived to gather up her sketching things.

    "How late you are,"she called again,"how late you are! Did you have a puncture, or what were you doing?"
    She pushed back her chair with a grating sound along the tiled floor of the verandah, and stood looking down bright-eyed at his weary, passive, disillusioned face.
    "I was right,"she said,"there are two sorts of egoists, and I am both."

THE LOVER
    HERBERT PILKINGTON rang the electric bell and, taking a few steps back, looked up to contemplate the house-front. In the full glare of the westerly sun it all looked trim and orderly enough; Cicely had not done so badly for herself, after all, by marrying Richard Evans. Herbert congratulated himself on having foreseen the whole thing from the beginning and furthered it with tact and sympathy. Of course it had been difficult to get poor Cicely off.... The hall-door was opened suddenly by Cicely's nervous little maid, who, flattening herself against the passage wall to allow of his entrance, contrived, by dodging suddenly under his arm, to reach the drawing-room door before him and fling it wide.
    Richard and Cicely were discovered seated at opposite ends of the sofa and looking very conscious. Cicely wore a pink blouse; she looked prettier than Herbert could have imagined and curiously fluffy about the ii6

    head. The white-walled drawing-room, dim in the ochreous twilight of drawn blinds, was hung with Richard's Italian water-colours and other pictorial mementos of the honeymoon; it smelt very strongly of varnish, and seemed to Herbert emptier than a drawing-room ought to be. The chairs and sofas had retreated into corners, they lacked frilliness; there was something just as startled and staccato about the room as there was about Cicely and Richard. Poor Mother and Dear Father eyed one another apprehensively from opposite walls; the very tick of the clock was hardly regular.
    They always gave one a warm welcome; Cicely was quite effusive, and long