Lucy knew that every one was looking at them, not at her, Lucy, the
bride (and she had been so proud and happy--childishly happy--to be a
bride), not at Tony, not even at Lady Dynevor, but at _them_, at the
situation. It seemed to Lucy so indecent, so vulgar.
"You will love Lucy, Vivian," Tony said quietly, and Lucy looked up at
the charming, gracious apparition so dominant, with her beautifully
friendly manner. Her eyes looked as if she could never find the bottom,
as if tears were just going to well up and drown them.
"Of course I shall," she said, and there was a little edge on her voice,
as if it were going to break. That was the feeling she gave you, Lucy
thought, of being on the brink of something, a tenseness like the moment
when the conductor's baton is raised before you have been released by
the music.
"How ill you look," Tony was saying. Vivian laughed,
"You always said that, do you remember----?"
Conversation was buzzing again. Lucy turned to her neighbour. Through
what he was saying, she could hear Tony--"your white velvet dress--do
you remember...?"
She got up to dance. The room seemed to whirl round her while she stood
quite still.
"Of course, we know all about Boston, Mrs. Everill," her partner was
saying, "it produces beans and Cabots and blue-stockings--and brides,"
he added, smiling.
Tony and Vivian were still sitting on their sofa. As she passed, she
heard Vivian laugh, "Do you remember?"
The evening seemed to Lucy interminable. Tony was very good. He did his
duty very nobly, dancing with every one, even his wife.
At half-past one they went home.
"How charming Lady Dynevor is," Lucy murmured.
"Charming?" Tony looked puzzled. "Vivian?"
It obviously seemed to him an almost grotesquely irrelevant, inadequate
word. And then, feeling that something was expected of him, "She is a
wonderful woman, loyal, faithful, a real friend."
"She is very pretty," Lucy said.
"Pretty, is she? I hadn't noticed it." Again he seemed puzzled, as if it
were really too difficult to connect up these absurd adjectives with
Vivian. Then an idea occurred to him.
"You're not _jealous_, sweetheart, are you?"
"No," she lied.
"Vivian is--well, Vivian," he explained, making matters worse. And Lucy
knew that if she had said "beautiful, fascinating, majestic," if she had
used all the superlatives in the world, they would have seemed to him
equally irrelevant and inadequate. But Tony was very much in love with
his wife and she knew it and soon, in his tender, whimsical, loving,
teasing way, he had made her perfectly happy again.
She was standing in front of her dressing-table, her cendre
hair--shadows shot with sunlight--falling like a waterfall over her
shoulders. With one hand she was combing it, with the other she fingered
a bundle of snapshots taken on their honeymoon--lovely snapshots, full
of sunshine and queer, characteristic positions and expressions. They
might, she thought, have been taken by a loving detective.
Tony came in.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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