Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
Then Lethway joined them. London was not kind to him. He had felt, like many Canadians, that in going to England he was going home. But England was cold. Not the people on the streets. They liked the Canadians and they cheered them when their own regiments went by unhailed.
This hurling forward over black water, this sense of danger, visualised by precautions, this going to something new and strange, set every nerve to jumping. She threw back her rug, and getting up went to the rail. Lethway, the manager, followed her. "Nervous, aren't you?" "Not frightened, anyhow." It was then that he told her how he had sized the situation up. She was a hit or nothing.
Then youth and fatigue triumphed and she fell asleep. Her last thought was of the boy, after all. "He wouldn't do a thing like that," she reflected. "He's a gentleman. He's the real thing. He's " Her eyes closed. Lethway apologised the next day, apologised with an excess of manner that somehow made the apology as much of an insult as the act.
But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting her one day in Oxford Circus, almost passed her before he knew her. He stopped her then. "Haven't been sick, have you?" "Me? No." "There's something wrong."
She wanted to stand by the poster and cry to the passing women to hold their men back. As she now knew she hated Lethway, she hated England. She wandered on. Near Charing Cross she spent the sixpence for a bunch of lilies of the valley, because he had said once that she was like them. Then she was for throwing them in the street, remembering the thing she would soon be.
It was delightful to gamble, she declared, and put the fifty cents into a smoking-room pool. The boy was clearly infatuated. She looked like a debutante, and, knowing it, acted the part. It was not acting really. Life had only touched her so far, and had left no mark. When Lethway lounged away to an evening's bridge Cecil fetched his military cape and they went on deck.
The boy, meeting her on the companionway, gasped. That night he asked permission to move over to her table, and after that the three of them ate together, Lethway watching and saying little, the other two chattering. They were very gay. They gambled to the extent of a quarter each, on the number of fronds, or whatever they are, in the top of a pineapple that Cecil ordered in, and she won.
He bothered Lethway by walking the deck with him and looking at him with what Lethway refused to think was compassion. But because, contrary to the boy's belief, none of us is quite good or quite evil, he was kind to the boy. The khaki stood for something which no Englishman could ignore. "Poor little devil!" he said on the last day in the smoking room, "he's going to a bad time, all right.
She shook it back, and danced the encore without the fillet. With her scant chiffons whirling about her knees, her loose hair, her girlish body, she was the embodiment of young love, of its passion, its fire. Edith had been spring, palpitant with gladness. Lethway, looking with tired eyes from the wings, knew that he had made a commercial success.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking