Bridge does not come easily to a mind brought up on Snap and Happy Families; besides, it bored her friends to play with me.
I felt my youthful presence put a curb upon their conversation, much as a parlour-maid does until the arrival of dessert, and they could not fling themselves so easily into the melting-pot of scandal and insinuation.
Her men-friends would assume a sort of forced heartiness and ask me jocular questions about history or painting, guessing I had not long left school and that this would be my only form of conversation.
I sighed, and turned away from the window.
The sun was so full of promise, and the sea was whipped white with a merry wind.
I thought of that corner of Monaco which I had passed a day or two ago, and where a crooked house leant to a cobbled square.
High up in the tumbled roof there was a window, narrow as a slit.
It might have held a presence mediaeval; and, reaching to the desk for pencil and paper, I sketched in fancy with an absent mind a profile, pale and aquiline.
A sombre eye, a high-bridged nose, a scornful upper lip.
And I added a pointed beard and lace at the throat, as the painter had done, long ago in a different time.
Someone knocked at the door, and the lift-boy came in with a note in his hand.
'Madame is in the bedroom,' I told him but he shook his head and said it was for me.
I opened it, and found a single sheet of note-paper inside, with a few words written in an unfamiliar hand.
'Forgive me.
I was very rude this afternoon.'
That was all.
No signature, and no beginning.
But my name was on the envelope, and spelt correctly, an unusual thing.
'Is there an answer?' asked the boy.
I looked up from the scrawled words.
'No,' I said.
'No, there isn't any answer.'
When he had gone I put the note away in my pocket, and turned once more to my pencil drawing, but for no known reason it did not please me any more; the face was stiff and lifeless, and the lace collar and the beard were like props in a charade.
Chapter four
The morning after the bridge party Mrs Van Hopper woke with a sore throat and a temperature of a hundred and two.
I rang up her doctor, who came round at once and diagnosed the usual influenza.
'You are to stay in bed until I allow you to get up,' he told her; 'I don't like the sound of that heart of yours, and it won't get better unless you keep perfectly quiet and still.
I should prefer', he went on, turning to me, 'that Mrs Van Hopper had a trained nurse.
You can't possibly lift her.
It will only be for a fortnight or so.'
I thought this rather absurd, and protested, but to my surprise she agreed with him.
I think she enjoyed the fuss it would create, the sympathy of people, the visits and messages from friends, and the arrival of flowers.
Monte Carlo had begun to bore her, and this little illness would make a distraction.
The nurse would give her injections, and a light massage, and she would have a diet.
I left her quite happy after the arrival of the nurse, propped up on pillows with a falling temperature, her best bed-jacket round her shoulders and be-ribboned boudoir cap upon her head.
Rather ashamed of my light heart, I telephoned her friends, putting off the small party she had arranged for the evening, and went down to the restaurant for lunch, a good half hour before our usual time.
I expected the room to be empty — nobody lunched generally before one o'clock.
It was empty, except for the table next to ours.
This was a contingency for which I was unprepared.
I thought he had gone to Sospel.
No doubt he was lunching early because he hoped to avoid us at one o'clock.
I was already half-way across the room and could not go back.
I had not seen him since we disappeared in the lift the day before, for wisely he had avoided dinner in the restaurant, possibly for the same reason that he lunched early now.
It was a situation for which I was ill-trained.
I wished I was older, different.
I went to our table, looking straight before me, and immediately paid the penalty of gaucherie by knocking over the vase of stiff anemones as I unfolded my napkin.
The water soaked the cloth, and ran down on to my lap.
The waiter was at the other end of the room, nor had he seen.
In a second though my neighbour was by my side, dry napkin in hand.
'You can't sit at a wet tablecloth,' he said brusquely; 'it will put you off your food.