Atrociously Jennie was behaving. She had been told by Madge in plain
words that she was expected to bathe with Julia that afternoon, and she
intended that Julia should be quite aware of the quality of her
obedience. Even in her little warning about the rip at the point there
had been a delicately-measured ungeniality, and their attitude as they
had walked from the tent together had been--well, polite. She had now
joined the Beverley girls in the water, and if Miss Oliphant cared to go
beyond the point after being warned not to that was her look-out. She
did not fail of a single attention to the older woman; but every time
she vacated a chair or asked Julia whether she could fetch her book she
had the air of saying to herself, "There, I did that and mother can't
say I didn't."
And I suppose it does make you a little cross when you are sent to bathe
when you want to be off somewhere on a bicycle.
Julia Oliphant had not bathed during that week-end she had spent in my
house in Surrey. It had been Derry who had done the swimming. But I
fancied it would have been different had she had that week-end to live
over again. She had remarkably little to be ashamed of in the water. The
long arm she threw out thickened, rather surprisingly and very
beautifully, up to its pit; and the man on the boat who had shown the
solicitude about the collar of her blanket-coat had been quite a good
judge of necks. Jennie's glistening dark-blue shape seemed still coltish
and nubile by comparison with Julia's ampler mould. But the twenty-odd
years that separated them were Jennie's stored and untouched riches, not
Julia's. It was Jennie, not Julia, who could stay half a day in that
water and come out without as much as the numbing of a finger-tip. And
the difference between Jennie's navy-blue "skin" and that other smart
and tricky green was the difference between the young leaf-bundle in
its sticky sheath and the broad opened palms of the chestnut in
midsummer.
As I sat there on the rocks, forgetting that escholtzia-yellow thing
about my shoulders as the seniors forget their tissue-paper caps at a
children's party, I pondered a resolve I had taken. Between Julia
Oliphant and myself there had not hitherto been a single secret in
anything that concerned Derwent Rose. But a secret there must now be.
She might find out about Derry and Jennie for herself, but from me she
should never hear it. Jennie was hardly likely to confide in her. Derry
himself--who knew?--might. Him she had not yet seen.
But we had spoken of him, and almost my first question had been to ask
her whether she had been staying on in England in the expectation of his
return. Her reply had been curiously, smilingly nonchalant.
"No, I don't think so; not altogether, that is. What does it matter
whether I see him there or here?"
"But you weren't seeing him, either there or here."
"Oh, there wasn't any hurry. It's only three weeks. That isn't very
long."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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