Beggar’s Choice

I heard him say, “I took the liberty of asking my brother to introduce me.” Then he asked her for a dance, and Fay and I finished ours.

I went and talked to Miss Willy after that. I was afraid she’d want to dance-and it’s just like dancing with a steam-engine. But she said she wanted to talk to me, and then I wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to risk being crushed. She’s a most overpowering person, and I don’t know how Isobel stands living with her. If it weren’t for Isobel, she’d have come some awful smash long ago.

I’ve never met any one with so much exuberant enthusiasm going to waste.

She began at once to talk about my uncle, and about A

And then she broke off to tell me all about a row she’d had with old Monk, and from that she got on to another row with the Vicar-I think the one with Monk had something to do with A

I seem to have written reams about last night, but I’m nearly through. I want to get it all down, and then go over it and see what I can make of it. There are just two more things to get down. I think one of them’s important.

Fay said she’d go home in a taxi, and I went out to get one. When I was coming back, I saw A

He said something I didn’t catch.

A

“You must stop him somehow.”

And then he stepped back, and she drew in her head, and the car went on.

Well, she must have meant me. And there isn’t anything strange in her not wanting me to go and stay with the Tarrants, because she naturally isn’t keen on my being anywhere within ten miles of Uncle John. But why tell Arbuthnot about it? I’d seen him introduced to her about half an hour before, and it struck me as pretty good going.

I got Fay, and we drove home. I wished I had walked, because she began to play up like she does sometimes. I shouldn’t want to flirt with Fay if there wasn’t another woman on earth-and she might have the common intelligence to know that I wouldn’t want to flirt with Peter’s wife. She doesn’t mean anything, of course, but it’s jolly bad form, and she riled me till I told her so straight out. In a way I’m fond of her, like you are of a second or third cousin, and it a

It began with my saying she ought to drop this silly Miss Everitt business and call herself Mrs. Lymington. I said it wasn’t fair. It isn’t. It worries me to hear Cori

“Because some one might fall in love with me? Is that what you mean?”

It wasn’t in the least what I meant, but I let it go at that, and I supposed it encouraged her.

“If I hadn’t been married to Peter-” she stopped there and put her head against my arm.

I said, “You are married to Peter.”

“And if I weren’t,” she said-“if I’d been free all the time-would you have fallen in love with me?”

I said, “No, I shouldn’t,” and I said it pretty sharply.

“If I were free now-”

I took her by the shoulder and put her back in her own corner of the car.

“Drop it, Fay!” I said. “You don’t mean anything, and you know it, and I know it, so why the devil do you do it? If you ask me, it’s the rottenest of rotten bad form.”

She flared out at me.

“I didn’t ask you! I’m not asking you anything! I hate you!”

“Don’t be an ass, Fay,” I said.

Then she began to cry and said I was a brute.

XIX

September 2lst-I’ve just been reading over what I wrote yesterday. The two points that matter are:

Who is employing me?

and

Why?

There are a lot of subsidiary ones. The most important of these seem to be:

1. A

2. Bobby Markham.

3. Fay.

I don’t know what to think about A

Bobby Markham-I can’t make out whether it was he who interviewed me in the hut. A

All the same it sticks in my mind that it wasn’t Bobby. I wonder if it was Arbuthnot. If A

Well that’s all I can get out of Bobby for the moment.

Then there’s Fay. All the threads that co