Delia Blanchflower | Page 3

in these Tyrolese hotels?"
"No; but I provide myself. I get my Times from home."
"Then, as an Englishman, you have all you want. But you seem to be without it to-night?"
"It hasn't arrived. So I am reduced, as you see, to listening to the music."
"You are not musical?"
"Well, I don't like this band anyway. It makes too much noise. Don't you think it rather a nuisance?"
"No. It helps these people to talk," she said, in a crisp, cheerful voice, looking round the room.
"But they don't want any help. Most of them talk by nature as fast as the human tongue can go!"
"About nothing!" She shrugged her shoulders.
Winnington observed her more closely. She was, he guessed, somewhere near fifty; her scanty hair was already grey, and her round, plain face was wrinkled and scored like a dried apple. But her eyes, which were dark and singularly bright, expressed both energy and wit; and her mouth, of which the upper lip was caught up a little at one corner, seemed as though quivering with unspoken and, as he thought, sarcastic speech. Was she, perchance, the Swedish Schriftstellerin of whom he had heard the porter talking to some of the hotel guests? She looked a lonely-ish, independent sort of body.
"They seem nice, kindly people," he said, glancing round the salon. "And how they enjoy life!"
"You call it life?"
He laughed out.
"You are hard upon them, madame. Now I--being a mere man--am lost in admiration of their good looks. We in England pride ourselves on our women, But upon my word, it would be difficult to match this show in an English hotel. Look at some of the faces!"
She followed his eyes--indifferently.
"Yes--they've plenty of beauty. And what'll it do for them? Lead them into some wretched marriage or other--and in a couple of years there will be neither beauty nor health, nor self-respect, nor any interest in anything, but money, clothes, and outwitting their husbands."
"You forget the children!"
"Ah--the children"--she said in a dubious tone, shrugging her shoulders again.
The Englishman--whose name was Mark Winnington--suddenly saw light upon her.
A Swedish writer, a woman travelling alone? He remembered the sketch of "feminism" in Sweden which he had just read. The names of certain woman-writers flitted through his mind. He felt a curiosity mixed with distaste. But curiosity prevailed.
He bent forward. And as he came thereby into stronger light from a window on his left, the thought crossed the mind of his neighbour that although so fully aware of other people's good looks, the tall Englishman seemed to be quite unconscious of his own. Yet in truth he appeared both to her, and to the hotel guests in general, a kind of heroic creature. In height he towered beside the young or middle-aged men from Munich, Buda-Pesth, or the north Italian towns, who filled the salon. He had all that athlete could desire in the way of shoulders, and lean length of body; a finely-carried head, on which the brown hair was wearing a little thin at the crown, while still irrepressibly strong and curly round the brow and temple; thick penthouse brows, and beneath them a pair of greyish eyes which had already made him friends with the children and the dogs and half the grown-ups in the place. The Swedish lady admitted--but with no cordiality--that human kindness could hardly speak more plainly in a human face than from those eyes. Yet the mouth and chin were thin, strong and determined; so were the hands. The man's whole aspect, moreover, spoke of assured position, and of a keen intelligence free from personal pre-occupations, and keeping a disinterested outlook on the world. The woman who observed him had in her handbag a book by a Russian lady in which Man, with a capital, figured either as "a great comic baby," or as the "Man-Beast," invented for the torment of women. The gentleman before her seemed a little difficult to fit into either category.
But if she was observing him, he had begun to question her.
"Will you forgive me if I ask an impertinent question?"
"Certainly. They are the only questions worth asking."
He laughed.
"You are, I think, from Sweden?"
"That is my country."
"And I am told you are a writer?" She bent her head. "I can see also that you are--what shall I say?--very critical of your sex--no doubt, still more of mine! I wonder if I may ask "--
He paused, his smiling eyes upon her.
"Ask anything you like."
"Well, there seems to be a great woman-movement in your country. Are you interested in it?"
"You mean--am I a feminist? Yes, I happen to dislike the word; but it describes me. I have been working for years for the advancement of women. I have written about it--and in the Scandinavian countries we have already got a good deal. The vote in Sweden and Norway; almost complete