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Miss Thesiger's appearance and her manner were perfect; but they didn't suggest by any sign or shade that she was a young woman seeking employment, that she was a young woman seeking anything; but rather that she was a young woman to whom all things naturally came. She approached me very slowly. Her adorable little salutation, with all its maturity, its gravity, was somehow essentially young.
Thesiger's manner had so much quiet propriety that objectors could only simmer in silence. Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the matter.
Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if she were detached even from the arms that held her.
I must have sat staring then quite a long time, not at her, but at one of Roland Simpson's sketches on the wall in front of me. She followed, but not quite accurately, the direction of my thoughts. "If you want references, I can give you heaps. General Thesiger's my uncle. Why? Do you know him?" I had ceased staring.
Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now, perhaps, when I'm running away with your precious perfection, at last you understand?"
It wasn't only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about. That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened. He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday.
That would not content me." She looked so imperial, so beautiful, that I wondered involuntarily what would content her, she who might have anything. "Whatever you yourself think right, Coralie, you shall have." I saw a strong disapproval in Lady Thesiger's face, and Coralie's quick eyes, following mine, read the same.
Lady Thesiger came over to look at them, but my darling was not to see them until they were her own. There was an unpleasant duty to perform. What was to be done with Coralie? Knowing Lady Thesiger's opinion of her, I felt sure she would never allow her daughter to live in the same house. What was to be done with her? Where was she to go? I did not know in the least what to suggest.
It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here. Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?" There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her. "I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for anything," said Jimmy.
He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him. The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's. "But if I stay here I shall ruin it.
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