said Mr. Bolham. "Prettyish, if you like, and good legs. But a vicious fool. So's he."
"How irresponsible you are in your statements," observed Mrs. Morgan.
Mr. Bolham, who had a not inconsiderable reputation as a savant in his own circles—which were London Library circles—received this in surprised silence.
The young man, Moon, approached them.
"I wonder if I might bother you for a light, sir," he said, with an accent of nonchalance that completely neutralised his use of the respectful monosyllable. "One hasn't yet learnt to realise that one isn't wearing pockets."
The slighting gesture with which he indicated his smart new beach-wear was directed towards Mrs. Morgan, who smiled in reply.
Mr. Bolham, not smiling, produced matches.
"Thanks. My wife remembered to bring down her cigarette-case, but forgot the matches. Here you are, Angie." His wife had joined them.
He lit her cigarette.
"Thanks a lot," said the girl, not looking at any of them.
There was a moment's pause.
"Well—I think we'll go and have a dip," said Mr. Moon. "It's a bore not having brought a car. We didn't know this Hotel was so far from the sea."
"It's a disadvantage," Mary Morgan agreed.
Mr. Bolham, whose large Sunbeam was in the Hotel garage, said no word, and the Moons, swaying slightly from the hips as they walked, went away.
(3)
"Pretty bloody, weren't they?" observed Hilary.
"Oh, quite. Still, one's got to begin somewhere, and the concierge says the Morgans have been here longer than anyone. They're sure to know everybody in the Hotel."
"Well, I shall go round to those villa people this evening. I suppose it might be as well to try and remember their name first."
Angie made no reply. The Moons seldom held sustained conversations with one another.
She cursed the heat, and the uneven surface of the winding road, and decided within her own mind that the old stick-in-the-mud—this was Mr. Bolham—was worse than useless, though Hilary might stand a possible chance with him, provided he didn't swank. She knew this by instinct, as she also knew by instinct that Mr. Bolham was a rich man whose wealth had been inherited rather than earned.
Mrs. Morgan was not rich, and she clearly belonged to a world about which the Moons practically knew nothing whatever, and which knew nothing whatever about them.
Angie dismissed her.
The pink-pyjama'd woman was the person to cultivate—Mrs. Romayne. She obviously shared Angie's own predilections for free drinks, the society of men, and an atmosphere of talk and laughter, and noise, and general looseness.
The French people were no use.
Buckland and Waller were both young, more or less unattached, and each had certainly remarked Angie. They would be easy.
The American, Muller, was obviously most worth while, but he would also be far more impervious to her attractions than the younger and less experienced men. Angie had no illusions, and she knew very well that a rich and travelled American would have met her type over and over again.
CHAPTER II
(1)
The rocks, to which Mrs. Romayne's new and superb Buick conveyed the party at break-neck speed, formed a small bay where a section of the Mediterranean splashed gently and tidelessly.
Buckland pulled the car up by the side of the road, and everyone got out and began the descent, which was steep and necessitated climbing.
The children, already in bathing-suits, negotiated it easily. Patrick Romayne hung back, and put out his hand doubtfully to help his mother.
"Don't touch me," she screamed. "I shall overbalance if you do."
"I'll go first," volunteered Denis Waller, clinging in a most uncertain fashion to a ledge of red rock, and inwardly terrified lest he might be going to make a fool of himself by slipping, and breaking the glass of his wrist-watch. It was a new wrist-watch, set in a broad gold band, and it helped to bolster up his deficient self-assurance, because he secretly felt that it lent him individuality.
Mrs. Romayne screamed again, this time with derisive laughter.
"There wouldn't be much left of you, if I fell on you," she said crudely but accurately.
Waller privately winced. He was sensitive about himself in every possible aspect, but perhaps most of all where his small and skinny physical appearance was concerned.
Buckland, big and strong and hairy, thrust himself forward.
"Come on," he ordered masterfully. "I've got you."
He grasped Mrs. Romayne by the arm—the shoulder—the ankle—anywhere—half pushing and half lifting her down.
Denis Waller gritted his teeth.
He disliked Buckland intensely, and thought him a cad; nevertheless he envied him.
Why couldn't he have some of Buckland's self-confidence, his loud efficiency, and his easy success?
Denis slipped a little further down the rock, glanced round surreptitiously to see if anyone had noticed it and was despising him, and continued to slither, slowly and carefully—for he was rather frightened—in the rear of the party.
As he went, he comforted himself with a series of phantasies that had sustained him, varying hardly at all through the years, ever since his little boyhood.
The assumption on which most of these phantasies rested was to the effect that Denis Hannaford Waller had, in a past existence, been one of the world's Great Teachers—(which of them, he hardly liked to formulate even to himself, although he had his own secret convictions on the subject). Deliberately, on returning once more to earth, he had elected to embrace humiliation, an insignificant position, a frail and unimposing physique. Through the medium of these disadvantages, he would not only attain to a higher spirituality, but would continue his mission to humanity.
It was a large, indefinite mission, that embraced general understanding, and helpfulness, and service, and soon after attaining his seventeenth year, Denis had found that all these could be offered to, and welcomed by, girls of his own age or rather younger, of an intelligence slightly inferior to his own. Often and often these alliances of the spirit had landed him in difficulties, but he sincerely believed, on each occasion, that the difficulties had only been occasioned by the unworthiness, fickleness, or weakness, of the people whom he had tried to help. His own
