Balloons | Page 7

her neighbours loved her, while secretly congratulating themselves on having always been right about Boston (which they had never visited and of which they knew nothing).
After dinner a few guests trickled in for the tiny dance that was to follow. It was all very much as Lucy had imagined it, old ladies delighted by her youth, old men delighted by her prettiness. Every one saying that she was very un-American (by which they meant unlike the Americans they had known).
Then, suddenly, a hushed silence grabbed hold of all the various conversations. Tony got up. His hostess was saying, "I want to present Mrs. Everill." Some one in a corner gave a little suppressed laugh, Lucy looked.
She saw a thin, dark woman with charming irregular features and a figure which looked as if it had been put into her black velvet dress with a shoehorn, and she heard her say in a low voice which somehow seemed to creep inside shut parts of you, "Tony and I are very old friends." They were coming straight to her and then, next thing she knew was that voice again, saying, "Mrs. Everill, you must forgive me if I say that, for the moment, you are to me, just Tony's wife. But, of course, I know that to be that you must be a great many other things besides."
Lucy knew that every one was looking at them, not at her, Lucy, the bride (and she had been so proud and happy--childishly happy--to be a bride), not at Tony, not even at Lady Dynevor, but at them, at the situation. It seemed to Lucy so indecent, so vulgar.
"You will love Lucy, Vivian," Tony said quietly, and Lucy looked up at the charming, gracious apparition so dominant, with her beautifully friendly manner. Her eyes looked as if she could never find the bottom, as if tears were just going to well up and drown them.
"Of course I shall," she said, and there was a little edge on her voice, as if it were going to break. That was the feeling she gave you, Lucy thought, of being on the brink of something, a tenseness like the moment when the conductor's baton is raised before you have been released by the music.
"How ill you look," Tony was saying. Vivian laughed,
"You always said that, do you remember----?"
Conversation was buzzing again. Lucy turned to her neighbour. Through what he was saying, she could hear Tony--"your white velvet dress--do you remember...?"
She got up to dance. The room seemed to whirl round her while she stood quite still.
"Of course, we know all about Boston, Mrs. Everill," her partner was saying, "it produces beans and Cabots and blue-stockings--and brides," he added, smiling.
Tony and Vivian were still sitting on their sofa. As she passed, she heard Vivian laugh, "Do you remember?"
The evening seemed to Lucy interminable. Tony was very good. He did his duty very nobly, dancing with every one, even his wife.
At half-past one they went home.
"How charming Lady Dynevor is," Lucy murmured.
"Charming?" Tony looked puzzled. "Vivian?"
It obviously seemed to him an almost grotesquely irrelevant, inadequate word. And then, feeling that something was expected of him, "She is a wonderful woman, loyal, faithful, a real friend."
"She is very pretty," Lucy said.
"Pretty, is she? I hadn't noticed it." Again he seemed puzzled, as if it were really too difficult to connect up these absurd adjectives with Vivian. Then an idea occurred to him.
"You're not jealous, sweetheart, are you?"
"No," she lied.
"Vivian is--well, Vivian," he explained, making matters worse. And Lucy knew that if she had said "beautiful, fascinating, majestic," if she had used all the superlatives in the world, they would have seemed to him equally irrelevant and inadequate. But Tony was very much in love with his wife and she knew it and soon, in his tender, whimsical, loving, teasing way, he had made her perfectly happy again.
She was standing in front of her dressing-table, her cendre hair--shadows shot with sunlight--falling like a waterfall over her shoulders. With one hand she was combing it, with the other she fingered a bundle of snapshots taken on their honeymoon--lovely snapshots, full of sunshine and queer, characteristic positions and expressions. They might, she thought, have been taken by a loving detective.
Tony came in.
"Do you remember," she said--and then, suddenly, with a wave of misery, she realised it. The phrase did not belong to her.

V
THE MARTYR
[To H.G. WELLS]
I, myself, have always liked Delancey Woburn. To begin with, there is something so endearing about the way he displays his defects, never hiding them or tidying them away or covering them up. There they are for all the world to see, a reassuring shop window full of frank shortcomings. Besides, I never can resist triumphant vitality. Delancey is overflowing with joie de vivre, with curiosity, with a certainty of