"In the meantime, let's talk about selling automobiles, or the weather,
anything but the war," Sophie said suddenly. She pressed a button on the
wall. "We're going to drink tea and forget the war," she continued
almost defiantly. "I won't ask either of you to stay for dinner, because
I'm going out."
Carr's house sat on a slope that dipped down to a long narrow park, and
beyond that to a beach on which slow rollers from the outside broke with
a sound like the snore of a distant giant. Along that slope and away to
the eastward the city was speckled with lights, although it was barely
five o'clock, so early does dark close in in that latitude when the year
is far spent. And when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of
twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light
intermittently stabbing the murky Gulf, was shut away by drawn blinds,
and the four of them sat in the cosy room eating little cakes and
drinking tea and chatting lightly of things that bulked smaller than the
war.
Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal
technicality over which they had fallen into dispute. Sophie lay back
in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw
through them and into vast distances beyond.
And Thompson sat covertly looking at her profile, the dull gold of her
coiled hair, the red-lipped mouth that was made for kisses and
laughter--and he was glad just to look at her, to be near. For he was
beginning to say to himself that it was no good fighting against fate,
that this girl had put some spell on him from which he would never be
wholly free. Nor did he, in that mood, desire to be free. He wanted that
spell to grow so strong that in the end it would weave itself about her
too, make love beget love. There was quickening in him again that desire
to pursue, to conquer, to possess. The ego in him whispered that once
for a moment Sophie had rested like a homing bird in his arms, and
would, again. But he was not to be betrayed by headlong impulse. The
time was not yet. Instinct warned him that in some fashion, vague,
unrevealed, he had still to prove himself to Sophie Carr. He was aware
intuitively that she weighed him in the balance of cold, critical
reason, against any emotional appeal--just as he, himself, was learning
to weigh things and men. He did not know this. He only felt it. But he
felt sure of his instinct where she was concerned.
And so he was content, for the time, with the privilege of being near
her. Some day-Sophie looked at him. For the moment his own gaze had wandered from her
to the fire, his mind yielding tentatively to rose-tinted visions.