and escape from real life into the society of imaginary and fiery people. Another one—"
Dodo stopped suddenly, as a man came out of the drawing-room window. Then she held both her hands out.
"Ah, Jack," she said. "Welcome, welcome!"
A very kind face, grizzled as to the hair and mustache, looked down on her from its great height, a face that was wonderfully patient and reasonable and trustworthy. Jack Chesterford wore his years well, but he wore them all; he did not look to be on the summer side of forty-five. He was spare still: life had not made him the unwilling recipient of the most voluminous and ironic of its burdens, obesity, but his movements were rather slow and deliberate, as if he was tired of the senseless repetition of the days. But there seemed to be no irritation mingled with his fatigue: he but yawned and smiled, and turned over fresh pages.
But at the moment, as he stood there with both Dodo's hands in his, there was no appearance of weariness, and indeed it would have been a man of dough who remained uninspired by the extraordinary perfection and cordiality of her greeting. It was almost as if she welcomed a lover: it was quite as if she welcomed the best of friends long absent. That she had thought out the manner of her salutation, said nothing against its genuineness, but she could have welcomed him quite as genuinely in other modes. She had thought indeed of putting pathos, penitence, and shamefacedness into her greeting: she could with real emotion to endorse it have just raised her eyes to his and let them fall again, as if conscious of the need of forgiveness. Or (with perhaps a little less genuineness) she could have adopted the matronly and 'too late' attitude; but this would have been less genuine because she did not feel at all matronly, or think that it was in the least 'too late.' But warm and unmixed cordiality, with no consciousness of things behind, was perhaps the most genuine and least complicated of all welcomes, and she gave it.
She did not hold his hands more than a second or two, for Nadine and others claimed them. But after a few minutes he and Dodo were alone again together, for Jack declined the invitation to join the bathers, on the plea of senility and feeling cold like David. Then when the noise of their laughter and talk had faded seawards, he dropped the trivialities that till now had engaged them, and turned to her.
"I have been a long time coming, Dodo," he said. "Indeed, I meant never to come at all. But I could not help it. I do not think I need explain either why I stopped away or why I have come now."
Apart from the perfectly authentic pleasure that Dodo felt in seeing her old friend again, there went through her a thrill of delight at Jack's implication of what she was to him. She loved to have that power over a man; she loved to know how potent over him still was the spell she wielded. In days gone by she had not behaved well to him; it would be truer to acknowledge that she had behaved just as outrageously as was possible for anybody not a pure-bred fiend. But he had come back. It was unnecessary to explain why.
And then suddenly with the rush of old memories revived, memories of his unfailing loyalty to her, his generosity, his unwearying loving-kindness, her eyes grew dim, and her hands caught his again.
"Jack dear," she said, "I want to say one thing. I am sorry for all I did, for my—my treachery, my—my damnedness. I was frightened: I have no other excuse. And, my dear, I have been punished. But I tell you, that what hurts most is your coming here—your forgiveness."
She had not meant to say any of this; it all belonged to one of the welcomes of him which she had rejected. But the impulse was not to be resisted.
"It is so," she said with mouth that quivered.
"Wipe it all out, Dodo," he said. "We start again to-day."
Dodo's power of rallying from perfectly sincere attacks of emotion was absolutely amazing and quite unimpaired. Only for five seconds more did her gravity linger.
"Dear old Jack," she said. "It is good to see you. Oh, Jack, the gray hairs. What a lot, but they become you, and you look just as kind and big as ever. I used to think it would be so dreadful when we were all over forty, but I like it quite immensely, and the young generation are such ducks, and I am not the least envious of them. But aren't some of them weird? I wonder if we were as weird; I was always weirdish, I suppose, and I'm too old to change now. But I've still got one defect, though you would hardly believe it: I can't get enough into the day, and I haven't learned how to be in two places at once. But I have just had three telephone lines put into my house in town. Even that isn't absolutely satisfactory, because the idea was to talk to three people at once, and I quite forgot that I hadn't three ears. I really ought to have been one of the people in the Central Exchange, who give you the wrong number. You must feel really in the swim, if you are the go-between of everybody who wants to talk to everybody else; but I should want to talk to them all. Have you had tea? Yes? Then let us go down to the sea, because I must have a bathe before dinner.—Oh, by the way, Edith is coming to-night. I have not seen her yet. You and she were the remnant of the old guard who wouldn't surrender, Jack, but went on sullenly firing your muskets at me. I forgot Mrs. Vivian, but her ear-trumpet seems to make her matter less."
They went together across the lawn, which that morning had been so sweetly bird-haunted, and down the steep hillside that led across the sand-dunes to the sea. Here a mile of sands was framed between two bold headlands that plunged steeply into the sea, and Jack and Dodo walked along the firm, shining beach towards the huge boulders which had in some remote cataclysm been toppled down from the cliff, and formed the rocks than which John was so much older. Like brown amphibious sheep with fleeces of seaweed they lay grazing on the sands, and dotted about in the water, and from the end of them a long reef of cruel-forked rocks jutted out a couple of hundred yards into the sea. Higher up on the beach were more monstrous fragments, as big as cottages, behind which the processes of dressing and undressing of bathers could discreetly and invisibly proceed. Dodo had forgotten about this and talking rapidly was just about to advance round one of them when an agonized trio of male voices warned her what sight would meet her outraged eyes. The tide was nearly at its lowest and but a little way out, at the side of the reef, these rocks ended altogether, giving place to the wrinkled sand, and in among them were delectable rock-pools with torpid strawberry-looking anemones, and sideways-scuttling crabs with a perfect passion for self-effacement, which, if effacement was impossible, turned themselves into wide-pincered grotesques, and tried to make themselves look tall. Bertie and Esther who were already prepared for the bathe were pursuing marine excavations in one of these, and Dodo ecstatically pulled off her shoes and stockings, one of which fell into the rock-pool in question.
"Oh, Jack, if you won't bathe you might at least paddle," she said. "Berts, do you see that very red-faced anemone? Isn't it like Nadine's maid? Esther, do take care. There's an enormous crab crept under the seaweed by your foot. Don't let it pinch you, darling: isn't cancer the Latin for crab? It might give you cancer if it pinched you. Here are the rest of them: I must go and put on my bathing-dress. It's in the tent. I put up a tent for these children, Jack, at great expense, and they none of them ever use it. Nadine, are you going to read to us all in the water? Do wait till I come. What book is it? 'Poems and Ballads?' And so suspiciously like the copy Mr. Swinburne gave me. Don't drop it into the water more often than is necessary. You shall read us 'Dolores, our Lady of Pain,' as we step on sharp rocks and are pinched by crabs. How Mr. Swinburne would have liked to know that we read his poems as we bathed. And there's that other delicious one 'Swallow, my Sister, oh, Sister Swallow.' It sounds at first as if his sister was a pill, and he had to swallow her. Jack, dear, you make me talk nonsense, somehow. Come up with me as far as the tent, and while I get ready you shall converse politely from outside. It is so dull undressing without anybody to talk to."
Jack, though cordially invited to take part in the usual Symposium in Nadine's room that night at bed-time, preferred to go to his own, though he had no intention of going to bed. He wanted to think, to ascertain how he felt. He imagined that this would be a complicated process; instead he found it extraordinarily
