charming and engaging qualities and delightful company. They never asked his name, nor inquired about his birth, his family, or his occupation. They seemed to accept his curious fellowship with Starwick as a matter of course: they took him on their daily round of café’s, restaurants, night-clubs, and resorts, as if he were a lifelong friend of the family. And he accepted all their favours gracefully, politely, with wit and grace and charm, with a natural and distinguished dignity and ease. He, too, never asked disturbing questions; he was a diplomat by nature, a superb tactician from his birth. Nevertheless, the puzzled, doubting and inquiring expression in his eyes grew deeper day by day; his tongue was eloquently silent, but the question in his puzzled eyes could not be hidden, and constantly sought speech.
As for Eugene, he now felt for the first time an ugly, disquieting doubt: suddenly he remembered many things—words and phrases and allusions, swift, casual darts and flashes of memory that went all the way back to the Cambridge years, that had long since been forgotten—but that now returned to fill his mind. And sometimes when he looked at Starwick, he had the weird and unpleasant sensation of looking at someone he had never seen before.
LXXXV
At the last moment, when it seemed that the argosy of their battered friendship was bound to sink, it was Elinor who saved it again. Ann, in a state of sullen fury, had announced that she was sailing for home the next week; Eugene, that he was going South to “some quiet little place where”—so did his mind comfortably phrase it—“he could settle down and write.” As for Starwick, he remained coldly, wearily, sorrowfully impassive; he accepted this bitter dissolution of their plans with a weary resignation at once sad and yet profoundly indifferent; his own plans were more wrapped in a mantle of mysterious and tragic secretiveness than ever before. And seeing the desperate state which their affairs had come to, and that she could not look for help from these three gloomy secessionists, Elinor instantly took charge of things again and became the woman who had driven an ambulance in the war.
“Listen, my darlings,” she said with a sweet, crisp frivolity, that was as fine, as friendly, as comforting, and as instantly authoritative as the words of a capable mother to her contrary children—“no one is going away; no one is going back home; no one is going anywhere except on the wonderful trip we’ve planned from the beginning. We’re going to start
