A moment later he stopped the car and, before getting out, pulled her towards him and kissed her.
Primrose returned the kiss fiercely and he felt her hands clutching at him.
She was both exciting and easily excited, but already he wished that he had never embarked on the affair.
The idea of carrying it on in the girl's own home was idiotic, tasteless, and repellent to him. He was angry and disgusted with himself for having lacked the courage to tell her so when she had first suggested the plan.
As usual, he had been afraid of hurting her. As though a girl like that, whose affairs were as numerous as they were short-lived, was ever going to be hurt by any man! Least of all, he unsparingly added, a man twenty-four years older than herself at whom she had only made a pass on a meaningless impulse, at a dull party.
Instinctively, he released his hold of her.
"What's the matter?" asked Primrose.
"Nothing. Hadn't we better go on?"
Primrose gave her short, unamused laugh.
"I suppose so."
She had taken his words in a sense far other than that in which he had meant them.
Lonergan got out and opened the gate, drove through and then got out to shut it again.
When he returned Primrose had switched on the light in the roof and was making up her face. Her gummed-looking curls were perfectly in place.
"Ready, Primrose?"
"Not yet."
He sat without moving, his eyes fixed upon her, but neither seeing her nor thinking of her.
In a few minutes now they would reach the house.
Had Primrose Arbell's mother, more than a quarter of a century ago, been that touching child to whom he had made most innocent and idyllic love for a few breathless afternoons in a Roman garden, before—like the catastrophe in a Victorian novel—her parents had sent him to the right-about?
If so, she might well have forgotten the whole episode, his name included. Perhaps he'd have forgotten, too, if it hadn't been for that startlingly unforeseen interview—again, like the Victorian novel—with her parents, and for the odd, rather charming artificiality of such a name as Valentine Levallois. Yet some romantic certainty in him repudiated that idea, even as he formulated it. At all events, he wouldn't now recognize her, any more than she him. And it would be for her to decide whether or no she remembered his name. Whatever Primrose might say of her mother's incompetence Lonergan felt quite convinced that, socially, she was not likely to be anything less than wholly competent.
"Okay now, darling."
"Right."
He drove on.
The house, like all houses now, stood in utter darkness.
He drew up in front of the stone pillars with the lead-roofed portico above the door.
"Ring," directed Primrose. "There's a chain affair, to the left of the door."
Lonergan, leaving her seated in the car, got out and after some trouble found the chain, which seemed unduly high above his head. When he grasped it, he could tell that it had been broken off and not repaired. His vigorous pull resulted in a prolonged mournful, jangling sound, a long way off, that reminded him of country houses in Ireland where there lived, for years and years, elderly and impoverished people.
An outburst of barking followed from within the house, and he could hear someone approaching.
"They're coming, Primrose."
Lonergan stepped back to the car and put out a hand to help her out. He had no intention of walking into the house without her.
"Are you all right, now?"
"I'm okay," said Primrose.
Her voice sounded sullen as though she had dropped her words from one corner of her closed mouth, as she did when she was either out of temper or seeking to make an impression.
He guessed that both states of mind might be hers just then.
A young girl in a cap and apron opened the door, very gingerly so as to avoid showing any light, and Primrose—ignoring her—walked in.
Lonergan followed.
He said "Good evening" to the maid and she answered "Good evening, sir" in pert, cheerful tones. He wondered what she thought of Primrose.
They went through glass-panelled swing-doors and were met by a renewed outburst of barking.
"Hallo!" said a girl's voice, and he saw the speaker scramble up from the floor in front of the fire, gathering against her the barking puppy, its awkward legs and large paws dangling.
"Hallo," said Primrose, and she swung round to face Lonergan immediately behind her.
"Meet my sister Jess," she muttered. "Colonel Lonergan—Jess."
Jess shook hands.
He was surprised to see how young and school-girlish she looked.
"Sorry about all the noise," she cried, slapping the head of the barking, wriggling pup. "Shut up, aunt Sophy. Look, Primrose, don't you agree that she's the exact image of aunt Sophy?"
"She is, a bit."
"Aunt Sophy," began Jess, turning to Lonergan, and then she broke off, and exclaimed: "Here's mummie."
He watched her coming through some further door, crossing the hall towards them.
Prepared as he was in advance for the meeting, it yet astonished him profoundly to see, in that first instant, that he could perfectly recognize in this woman of his own age the young nymph of the Pincio Gardens.
She wasn't, of course, a young nymph now. Time had washed the colour from her brown hair—the wave in front was entirely silver—and from her face. Only the dense blue-green of her eyes remained. It flashed across his mind that he had never seen eyes of quite that colour since, and it did not occur to him until long afterwards that the eyes of Primrose were of exactly the same arresting, unusual shade.
The very shape of her face—a short oval, with the beautifully-defined line of the jaw still unmarred—brought back to him the sheer sensation of pleasure that, as a draughtsman, he had before experienced at the sight of its sharply cut purity of outline.
He moved towards her and she held out her hand, smiling.
"Colonel Lonergan? How do you do?"
Curiously taken aback, although for what reason he had no idea, Lonergan shook hands and repeated her conventional greeting.
"Oh! I remember your voice," she most unexpectedly exclaimed—and he was not sure that the unexpectedness had not struck herself as well as him.
"And
