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Updated: May 15, 2025
"I only meant that I didn't know you cared for that sort of thing, Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the Carlton this evening and do a theatre afterwards." "No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me." Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked magnificent. Jaffery frowned. "I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."
"You see, my dear Barbara," I interposed judicially, "her father made his living by slaughter before she was born. When he finished with the pigs he took on humans who displeased him." "And they were worse than the pigs," said Liosha.
So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the dancing sea and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long plume from a steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us and the tiny golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and were in fact giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when suddenly Liosha broke the spell.
But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the Vesta covered a period of abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the journalist's trick of instantaneous composition.
And though Jaffery has never confessed it, I am absolutely certain that, just as Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose, sans le savoir, so, without knowing it, was Jaffery in love with Liosha when she drove away from Northlands in Mr. Ras Fendihook's car. Perhaps before. Quien sabe? But he imagined himself to be in love with a moonbeam.
I was rather shaken, I must confess, by my narrative, and I turned aside and lit another cigarette. Liosha remained silent for a while, resting her cheek on her hand. At last she said in her deep tones: "Poor little devil! Good God! Poor little devil!" Tears flooded her eyes. "By heavens," I cried, "you're a good creature." "I'm nothing of the sort," said Liosha. She rose.
"I was aware of it," said Liosha seriously. "Euphemia was not. She knows less than nothing. I asked her for the money. She refused. I saw an automobile close by. I entered. I said, 'Drive me to Mr. Jaff Chayne, he will give me the money. He asked where Mr. Jaff Chayne was. I said he was staying with Mr. Freeth, at Northlands, Harston, Berkshire. I am not a fool like Euphemia. I remember.
But since Havre all sorts of extraordinary things had happened. There was now Doria's awful change of soul-attitude towards Adrian. It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the emotional subtleties that underlay the bare facts. It seemed cruel to tell her of the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so grotesque, between the man she loved and the other woman.
What happened when she left them I know, because Jaffery kept me up till three o'clock in the morning narrating it to me, while he poured into his Gargantuan self hogsheads of whisky and soda. When Liosha had gone, they eyed one another for a while in embarrassing silence, until Doria spoke: "She misunderstood when she came in. Quite natural. It was your touch of pity that I couldn't bear.
From fool thoughtlessness I had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in charge of the blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. "This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly. At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep from us turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into each other's eyes.
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