“Well,” said Venice, sticking out that Pollen jaw, “there’s no use in hanging about Paris, is there? And so I sent him a message to the Embassy, where he’s been all morning, to come as soon as he could and not worry about getting ‘sleepers.’ And as I’ve already had his things packed we can start off as soon as he’s here, which will be while we’re at coffee, I shouldn’t wonder.” That Pollen jaw! What, I wondered, was Venice thinking of when she stuck out that Pollen jaw like that? Maybe she had been disturbed by Napier’s white-thunder looks when they got back to the hotel last night and was wanting to get him to herself and normal as quickly as she could—and Provence, Oh, Provence! It is not every day that a girl can motor through Provence with her lover. Venice’s love was like a solid marble monument, and I said to myself that one should respect illness but also one should respect love, and so I held my peace.
Napier had not come by the time we had finished luncheon, and as we took two deep chairs in the corner of the lounge, where we would have coffee, Venice asked me if I knew anything about the psychology of men as regards children. When I had picked myself up I said that I would reserve my defence, laughing heartily the while, but now there was a cloud of thought over Venice’s mad-blue eyes, and she was ever so serious, a flat cigarette tortured between her full, pale, dry lips. Venice, you know, said she hated the taste of lip-salve; but, with no idea at all of ever doubting Venice’s word, one had noticed that it was only since her marriage that she had grown to hate it so consistently, and so it might be that Napier had made a face after kissing her one day, for it is the affectation of Englishmen to be tiresome about cosmetics, and if they are not tiresome about cosmetics they cannot be the right sort.
“Sugar?” I asked, and she nodded intently, her mad-blue eyes absorbed on a point of the thick carpet.
“How,” I said, “you will love Provence!”
“Listen,” she said sharply. Wise those eyes were now, and steady as stars in a cavern, looking into me as though judging me, balancing life.
“Well?” I said, to get it over. But what could she know?
She made herself look unimportant. “Oh, it’s only,” she said, “that I can’t have a baby.” And she looked at me with a frantic smile, and because every second of her twenty-one years seemed to me to be in that frantic smile I did not know what on earth to say, saying: “You have probably been to some silly doctor—”
“I haven’t!” she whispered, so fiercely that an old gentleman nearby almost spilled his coffee.
“Hush, Venice!”
“But I haven’t been to any doctor—”
“Well, then,” said I wisely, “in that case, of course, I don’t see—”
“Oh, you don’t!” she whispered with her fine, savage impatience. “I tell you, my child, that I can’t—I just feel that I can’t, in my bones I feel it, that I’ll never, never, never!” And she put a cloud of smoke between us to make her smile look plausible, but through the smoke her eyes looked as though they were holding back a pain.
“Venice, darling,” I pleaded, “I’m not old enough to deal with an emergency like this. What you need is a man of Hilary’s years to turn you over and smack you and tell you that as long as you’re such a child you don’t deserve to have one—”
“I’m so miserable,” she said.
“But it’s absurd, Venice! I mean, it’s just nerves, you can’t possibly know—”
“Do you actually think,” she grabbed a cigarette fiercely from my case, “that I’ve got to go to some dud doctor and have him poking about all over me before I know what’s me! Of course I can know, and I do know, and it’s a shame, and I daren’t tell Napier. …”
“You better hadn’t, on such insufficient evidence. I know what I’d do.”
“Darling, darling, darling! Tell me, do men love children? Really, really, I mean? Would Napier hate it if he knew that I was as barren as that old fig-tree—”
“Venice, how dare you let your nerves get the better of you like this! I’ve only got to be away from England for four months, and I find you in this silly state!”
“Oh, but answer my questions! Why is everyone so awful these days! You see, I never know what’s going on in Napier’s mind, never! Do you think I would if he loved me?”
“ ‘If?’ ” I said. “ ‘If,’ Venice?” Was I now to defend Napier’s love for Venice? And then I found that she was looking at me with wide-open, motherly, amused eyes.
“You don’t actually think,” she almost laughed, “that I ever thought that Napier loved me?”
“Well, I have thought so,” I bravely admitted. “Certainly I have. It is quite usual.”
“But isn’t my gentleman friend stupid!” she suddenly giggled. “Of course, I know he loves me—as much as he can ever love anyone. But that’s all, don’t you see. …”
She stared at the wounded end of her poor cigarette, and lit another from my case, as that was handy. The number of cigarettes that girl smoked, and how she tortured them!
“You see,” she said, knitting together her golden eyebrows so that I should see, “Napier can’t love like other people—me, for instance, and perhaps you, though I’d have my doubts about you. I suppose people are born like that, and you’ve got to take it or leave it. Napier loves just as much as he can—which means that he’s willing, oh anxious, to do anything in the world for you—but you’re never quite sure what he’s thinking about while he’s doing it. See what I mean?”
“I try hard, Venice.”
“Yes. And so, you see, you’ve always got a feeling that he’s keeping something back in himself, something rather important, if you see what I
