Flowering Wilderness

“Very dark and dissolvent.”

Fleur laughed. “He always was.”

Looking at her, Di

“Yes. Uncle Lawrence told me he tried to carry dissolution rather far.”

Fleur looked surprised. “I didn’t know Bart ever noticed that.”

“Uncle Lawrence,” said Di

“Wilfrid,” murmured Fleur, with a little reminiscent smile, “really behaved quite well. He went East like a lamb.”

“But surely that hasn’t kept him East ever since?”

“No more than measles keep you permanently to your room. Oh! no, he likes it. He’s probably got a harem.”

“No,” said Di

“Quite right, my dear; and one for my cheap cynicism. Wilfrid’s the queerest sort of person, and rather a dear. Michael loved him. But,” she said, suddenly looking at Di

“Except,” queried Di

Fleur made the unexpected answer, “Well, my dear, we all believe in those, when they’re about. The trouble is they aren’t, unless– unless they lie in oneself, perhaps. And if you happen to be disharmonic, what chance have you? Where did you see him?”

“Staring at Foch.”

“Ah! I seem to remember he rather idolised Foch. Poor Wilfrid, he hasn’t much chance. Shell-shock, poetry, and his breeding—a father who’s turned his back on life; a mother who was half an Italian, and ran off with another. Not restful. His eyes were his best point, they made you sorry for him; and they’re beautiful– rather a fatal combination. Did the young nerves flutter again?” She looked rather more broadly into Di

“No, but I wondered if yours would still if I mentioned him.”

“Mine? My child, I’m nearly thirty. I have two children, and”– her face darkened—“I have been inoculated. If I ever told anyone about THAT, Di

Up in her room, somewhat incommoded by the amplitude of Aunt Em’s nightgown, Di

‘One gets tired of it,’ she thought—‘always the same Botticellian artifact,

HE was so accustomed to the East, to dark eyes through veils, languishing; to curves enticingly disguised; to sex, mystery, teeth like pearls—vide houri! Di

CHAPTER 3

Wilfred Desert still maintained his chambers in Cork Street. They were, in fact, paid for by Lord Mullyon, who used them on the rare occasions when he emerged from rural retreat. It was not saying much that the secluded peer had more in common with his second than with his eldest son, who was in Parliament. It gave him, however, no particular pain to encounter Wilfrid; but as a rule the chambers were occupied only by Stack, who had been Wilfrid’s batman in the war, and had for him one of those sphinx-like habits which wear better than expressed devotions. When Wilfrid returned, at a moment or two’s notice, his rooms were ever exactly as he left them, neither more or less dusty and unaired; the same clothes hung on the same clothes-stretchers; and the same nicely cooked steak and mushrooms appeased his first appetite. The ancestral ‘junk,’ fringed and dotted by Eastern whims brought home, gave to the large sitting-room the same castled air of immutable possession. And the divan before the log fire received Wilfrid as if he had never left it. He lay there the morning after his encounter with Di

Reading it through, he thought: ‘It’s a damned sight better and deeper than Lyall’s confounded poem.’ And without any obvious co

Partly because he was thinking of her, and partly because he took a taxi, he was late for lunch, and met Di

There is perhaps no better test of woman’s character than to keep her waiting for lunch in a public place. Di

“I thought you’d probably forgotten.”

“It was the traffic. How can philosophers talk of time being space or space time? It’s disproved whenever two people lunch together. I allowed ten minutes for under a mile from Cork Street, and here I am ten minutes late. Terribly sorry!”

“My father says you must add ten per cent to all timing since taxis took the place of hansoms. Do you remember the hansom?”

“Rather!”

“I never was in London till they were over.”

“If you know this place, lead on! I was told of it, but I’ve not yet been here.”