Oh, if she could only get him out of her mind altogether!
And had his wife chaffed him about her obvious infatuation for him?
Dorothy would have liked to make a friend of her, but that she found her second-rate.
Kitty smiled a little: how indignant her mother would be to know that her daughter was considered that!
But at night she dreamt of him again.
She felt his arms pressing her close and the hot passion of his kisses on her lips.
What did it matter if he was fat and forty?
She laughed with soft affection because he minded so much; she loved him all the more for his childlike vanity and she could be sorry for him and comfort him.
When she awoke tears were streaming from her eyes.
She did not know why it seemed to her so tragic to cry in her sleep.
XXXVII
SHE saw Waddington every day, for he strolled up the hill to the Fanes' bungalow when his day's work was done; and so after a week they had arrived at an intimacy which under other circumstances they could scarcely have achieved in a year.
Once when Kitty told him she didn't know what she would do there without him he answered, laughing:
"You see, you and I are the only people here who walk quite quietly and peaceably on solid ground.
The nuns walk in heaven and your husband - in darkness."
Though she gave a careless laugh she wondered what he meant.
She felt that his merry little blue eyes were scanning her face with an amiable but disconcerting attention.
She had discovered already that he was shrewd and she had a feeling that the relations between herself and Walter excited his cynical curiosity.
She found a certain amusement in baffling him.
She liked him and she knew that he was kindly disposed towards her.
He was not witty nor brilliant, but he had a dry and incisive way of putting things which was diverting, and his funny, boyish face under that bald skull, all screwed up with laughter, made his remarks sometimes extremely droll.
He had lived for many years in outposts, often with no man of his own colour to talk to, and his personality had developed in eccentric freedom.
He was full of fads and oddities. His frankness was refreshing.
He seemed to look upon life in a spirit of banter, and his ridicule of the Colony at Hong Kong was acid; but he laughed also at the Chinese officials in Mei-Tan-Fu and at the cholera which decimated the city.
He could not tell a tragic story or one of heroism without making it faintly absurd.
He had many anecdotes of his adventures during twenty years in China, and you concluded from them that the earth was a very grotesque, bizarre, and ludicrous place.
Though he denied that he was a Chinese scholar (he swore that the Sinologues were as mad as march hares) he spoke the language with ease.
He read little and what he knew he had learned from conversation.
But he often told Kitty stories from the Chinese novels and from Chinese history and though he told them with that airy badinage* which was natural to him it was good-humoured and even tender.
It seemed to her that, perhaps unconsciously, he had adopted the Chinese view that the Europeans were barbarians and their life a folly: in China alone was it so led that a sensible man might discern in it a sort of reality.
Here was food for reflexion: Kitty had never heard the Chinese spoken of as anything but decadent, dirty, and unspeakable.
It was as though the corner of a curtain were lifted for a moment, and she caught a glimpse of a world rich with a colour and significance she had not dreamt of.
He sat there, talking, laughing, and drinking.
"Don't you think you drink too much?" said Kitty to him boldly.
"It's my great pleasure in life," he answered. "Besides, it keeps the cholera out."
When he left her he was generally drunk, but he carried his liquor well.
It made him hilarious, but not disagreeable.
One evening Walter, coming back earlier than usual, asked him to stay to dinner.
A curious incident happened.
They had their soup and their fish and then with the chicken a fresh green salad was handed to Kitty by the boy.
"Good God, you're not going to eat that," cried Waddington, as he saw Kitty take some.
"Yes, we have it every night."
"My wife likes it," said Walter.
The dish was handed to Waddington, but he shook his head.
"Thank you very much, but I'm not thinking of committing suicide just yet."
Walter smiled grimly and helped himself.
Waddington said nothing more, in fact he became strangely taciturn, and soon after dinner he left them.
It was true that they ate salad every night.
Two days after their arrival the cook, with the unconcern of the Chinese, had sent it in and Kitty, without thinking, took some.
Walter leaned forward quickly.