The Romantic | Page 5

faces straining furtively. If they knew--if they only knew. She stood, reading.
She heard the door shut. She could look in the glass now and amuse herself by the sight they had stared at. The white face raised on the strong neck and shoulders. Soft white nose, too thick at the nuzzling tip. Brown eyes straight and wide open. Deep-grooved, clear-cut eyelids, heavy lashes. Mouth--clear-cut arches, moulded corners, brooding. Her eyes and her mouth. She could see they were strange. She could see they were beautiful.
And herself, her mysterious, her secret self, Charlotte Redhead. It had been secret and mysterious to itself once, before she knew.
She didn't want to be secret and mysterious. Of all things she hated secrecy and mystery. She would tell Gwinnie about Gibson Herbert when she came. She would have to tell her.
Down at the end of the looking-glass picture, behind her, the bow window and the slender back of a man standing there.
* * * * *
She had got him clear by this time. If he went to-morrow he would stay, moving about forever in your mind. The young body, alert and energetic; slender gestures of hands. The small imperious head carried high. The spare, oval face with the straight-jutting, pointed chin. Honey-white face, thin dusk and bistre of eyelids and hollow temples and the roots of the hair. Its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an adventure. Hair brushed back in two sleek, dark wings. The straight slender nose, with the close upward wings of its nostrils (it wasn't Roman after all). Under it the winged flutter of his mouth when he smiled.
Black eyebrows almost meeting, the outer ends curling up queerly, like little moustaches. And always the hard, blue knife-blade eyes.
She knew his name the first day. He had told her. Conway. John Roden Conway.
The family from Birmingham had frightened him. So he sat at her table in the bow. They talked. About places--places. Places they had seen and hadn't seen; places they wanted to see, and the ways you could get to places. He trusted to luck; he risked things; he was out, he said, for risk. She steered by the sun, by instinct, by the map in her head. She remembered. But you could buy maps. He bought one the next day.
They went for long walks together. She found out the field paths. And they talked. Long, innocent conversations. He told her about himself. He came from Coventry. His father was a motor car manufacturer; that was why he liked tramping.
She told him she was going to learn farming. You could be happy all day long looking after animals. Swinging up on the big bare backs of cart horses and riding them to water; milking cows and feeding calves. And lambs. When their mothers were dead. They would run to you then, and climb into your lap and sit there--sucking your fingers.
As they came in and went out together the family from Birmingham glared at them.
"Did you see how they glared?"
"Do you mind?" he said.
"Not a bit."
"No more do I. It doesn't matter what people like that do. Their souls are horrible. They leave a glairy trail everywhere they go. If they were dead--stretched out on their death beds--you'd see their souls, like long, fat white slugs stretched out too, glued to their bodies.... You know what they think? They think we met each other on purpose. They think we're engaged."
"I don't care," she said. "It doesn't matter what they think."
They laughed at the silliness of the family from Birmingham. He had been there five days.
* * * * *
"I--, sa-ay--"
Gwinnie's voice drawled in slow meditative surprise.
The brooding curiosity had gone out of her face. Gwinnie's face, soft and schoolgirlish between the fawn gold bands and plaited ear bosses of her hair, the pink, pushed out mouth, the little routing nose, the thick grey eyes, suddenly turned on you, staring.
Gwinnie had climbed up on to the bed to hear about it. She sat hunched up with her arms round her knees rocking herself on the end of her spine; and though she stared she still rocked. She was happy and excited because of her holiday.
"It can't make any difference, Gwin. I'm the same Charlotte. Don't tell me you didn't know I was like that."
"Of course I knew it. I know a jolly lot more than you think, kid."
"I'm not a kid--if you are two years older."
"Why--you're not twenty-four yet.... It's the silliness of it beats me. Going off like that, with the first silly cuckoo that turns up."
"He wasn't the first that turned up, I mean. He was the third that counted. There was poor Binky, the man I was engaged to. And Dicky Raikes; he wanted me to go to Mexico with him. Just for a