Free The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

occupied themselves, were a mystery to me. The
young men down from the university (as Marcus assured me they
were), the young women with even less to identify them, would greet
me on their way to or from the tennis court or the croquet lawn;
the men in white flannels, white shoes, and straw hats, the women,
also in white, with hourglass figures and hats like windmills; all
white, or nearly white, save for the men’s black socks, which
sometimes showed above their buckskin shoes. Some found more to say
to me than others; but they were only part of the scene and I never
had, or felt I ought to have, the smallest personal relationship
with them. They were they, and Marcus and I were we—different age
groups, as we should say now.
      And that was why, for the first day or two, I never
properly took in the fact that one of “them” was my host’s son, and
another his daughter. Blond (as they mostly were), dressed in
white, swinging their tennis rackets, they looked so much
alike!
      Denys, the son and heir, was a tall, fair young man
with unfinished features and a conceited expression (schoolboys are
quick to diagnose conceit). He was full of plans and opinions that
he would press for more than they were worth— which even I could
tell was not very much. He would grow warm enlarging upon the
advantage of such and such a project until his mother, with a few
cool words, would puncture it. I think he felt that she despised
him, and he was the more anxious to assert himself against her and
exercise the overt authority that his father never exerted. Between
Mr. and Mrs. Maudsley I never saw a sign of disagreement; she went
her way and he went his, gnome-like, leaving a trail of gold. I
should hardly have known they were married, accustomed as I was to
the more demonstrative manner of my parents. He alone, it seemed to
me, was not included in the plans that Mrs. Maudsley made for
everybody, for she had us all, I gradually realized, on a string,
which I came to think of as the beam of her dark eye. We seemed to
come and go unnoticed, but really we did not.
      “My sister is very beautiful,” Marcus said to me one
day. He announced it quite impersonally, as who should say “Two and
two make four,” and I received it in the same spirit. It was a
fact, like other facts, something to be learned. I had not thought
of Miss Marian (I think I called her this to myself) as beautiful,
but when I saw her next, I studied her in the light of Marcus’s
announcement. It must have been in the front part of the house, for
I have an impression of light, which was absent in our part,
Marcus’s and mine; I believe I had some schoolboy notion that the
front of the house, where the grown-up people lived, was the
“private side” and that I was trespassing when I went there. She
must have been sitting still for my scrutiny, for I have the
impression that I was looking down on her, and she was tall, even
by grown-up standards. I must have taken her unawares, for she was
wearing what I afterwards came to think of as her “hooded” look.
Her father’s long eyelids drooped over her eyes, leaving under them
a glint of blue so deep and liquid that it might have been shining
through an unshed tear. Her hair was bright with sunshine, but her
face, which was full like her mother’s, only pale rose-pink instead
of cream, wore a stern brooding look that her small curved nose
made almost hawklike. She looked formidable then, almost as
formidable as her mother. A moment later she opened her eyes—I
remember the sudden burst of blue—and her face lit up.
      So that is what it is to be beautiful, I thought,
and for a time my idea of her as a person was confused and even
eclipsed by the abstract idea of beauty that she represented. It
did not bring her nearer to me, rather the opposite; but I no
longer confused her with the other young ladies who circled,
planet-like, around the perimeter of my vision.
      Those early days were a time of