The Last September Read Free Page B

forgets the same thing twice: always, something different… .”
    “She looks sweet, I think. And surely the image of Laura.”
    “She’s not so much like Laura in character. There’s a good deal, I sometimes think, of poor Walter.
    “Wasn’t it terribly sad about Walter?”
    “To tell you the truth, it was what we always expected,” said Lady Naylor.
    When Francie was left alone she went to the window and shook the dust out of her motor veil. Then—she was so very tired from motoring, everything seemed to rush past—she sat down on the sofa and put her hands over her eyes. Her mind lay back in the slience, but there was a kind of sentinel in her, waiting for Hugo. She did not know what she should say if he noticed the drive from Carlow really had been too much for her. She had said beforehand she was afraid it might be too much, and he had said: Nonsense, that she was fit for anything nowadays. Flattered by this, she gave in. She was so tired—-just for these few moments when she let herself go—she could not bear to realize Danielstown. Her thoughts ached. When she looked out, there were some intolerable trees and a strip of gold field hot on the skyline.
    When she heard steps comiing, she fled to the wash-stand. Her skin was dry, her hair felt laden and limp, it was so dusty. But that was the fine, the phenomenal weather for which, in this country, one could not be thankful enough. When Hugo came through from his dressing-room she was washing her hands—they turned in the water like gentle porpoises in a slaver of violet soap.
    “Well,” he said, looking roound the room.
    “Well, Hugo … isn’t it lovely?”
    “Richard’s in great form—I thought I’d never get up at all to you—Not tired?”
    “Indeed, no … Doesn’t it all seem the same as ever?”
    “I tell you one thing: Myra’s ageing. Didn’t you notice?”
    “Oh,” said Francie vaguely. She stooped her face to the basin. The rain-water comforted, creeping into the pores. “ Oh !” she deprecated. She dried her face in damask, among stiff roses. “But then, we all are.”
    “She’s got into a terrible habit of shutting doors.”
    “Times have been worse down here. Yes, I thought, you know, she had rather a strained look. What does Richard know of the situation?… Oh, and had you any idea that Lois was so grown up? I had imagined her quite a schoolgirl. She’s so pretty, such a…a frank little face.”
    “She’s self-conscious,” said Hugo, “but I daresay most girls of that age are … I should lie down now for a bit, it will freshen you up though you don’t need it. Then would you like me to brush your hair?”
    Francie got her dressing-gown out of a trunk and lay down on the sofa. She had just relaxed there when Hugo said that the sofa did not look comfortable and she had better lie on the bed. He made a valley for her head between the two pillows—he did not believe it rested anybody to lie with their head high—and she lay down on the bed with her head in the valley. “Oh, but I don’t think I ought to lie on this lovely quilt,” she soon protested.
    “They’re not fussy here,” returned Hugo, “do lie and be still.”
    So she lay and watched him begin to unpack her two boxes, carry dresses over his arms and lay them along the shelves of the “gentleman’s wardrobe.” She wondered: whatever would Richard and Myra think?—“Uxorious” they would be bound to declare; Richard who could hardly handle a jug without dropping it, and Myra who would not have him otherwise.
    “What a disgusting noise,” said Hugo, pausing and listening.
    “Somebody playing a gramophone—”
    They might well say she had taken the brilliant young man he’d once been and taught him to watch her, to nurse her and shake out her dresses. And she knew she could, now, never explain to Myra what she years ago—when there had been so much less to justify —how Hugo was too much for her altogether. How she had tried, but had not been