“My dear, it wasn’t possible.
I mean, things either are possible or they’re not.
This wasn’t.
It was simply penetrating.”
That was the new word just now - everything was “penetrating”.
Sir Charles was vigorously shaking cocktails and talking to Angela Sutcliffe, a tall, grey-haired woman with a mischievous mouth and fine eyes.
Dacres was talking to Bartholomew Strange.
“Everyone knows what’s wrong with old Ladisbourne.
The whole stable knows.” He spoke in a high clipped voice - a little red, foxy man with a short moustache and slightly shifty eyes.
Beside Mr. Satterthwaite sat Miss Wills, whose play, One-Way Traffic, had been acclaimed as one of the most witty and daring seen in London for some years.
Miss Wills was tall and thin, with a receding chin and very badly waved fair hair.
She wore pince-nez, and was dressed in exceedingly limp green chiffon.
Her voice was high and undistinguished. “I went to the South of France,” she said. “But, really, I didn’t enjoy it very much.
Not friendly at all.
But of course it’s useful to me in my work - to see all the goings on, you know.”
Mr. Satterthwaite thought: “Poor soul. Cut off by success from her spiritual home - a boarding house in Bournemouth. That’s where she’d like to be.”
He marvelled at the difference between written works and their authors.
That cultivated “man-of-the-world” tone that Anthony Astor imparted to his plays - what faintest spark of it could be perceived in Miss Wills?
Then he noticed that the pale-blue eyes behind the pince-nez were singularly intelligent.
They were turned on him now with an appraising look that slightly disconcerted him.
It was as though Miss Wills were painstaking learning him by heart.
Sir Charles was just pouring out the cocktails.
“Let me get you a cocktail,” said Mr. Satterthwaite, springing up.
Miss Wills giggled.
“I don’t mind if I do,” she said.
The door opened and Temple announced Lady Mary Lytton Gore and Mr. and Mrs. Babbington and Miss Lytton Gore. As has been stated before, he had a weakness for titles.
Mr. Satterthwaite supplied Miss Wills with her cocktail and then sidled into the neighbourhood of Lady Mary Lytton Gore.
As has been stated before, he had a weakness for titles. Also, apart from snobbishness, he liked a gentlewoman, and that Lady Mary most undeniably was.
Left as a widow very badly off with a child of three, she had come to Loomouth and taken a small cottage where she had lived with one devoted maid ever since.
She was a tall thin woman, looking older than her fifty-five years.
Her expression was sweet and rather timid.
She adored her daughter, but was a little alarmed by her.
Hermione Lytton Gore, usually known for some obscure reason as Egg, bore little resemblance to her mother. She was of a more energetic type.
She was not, Mr. Satterthwaite decided, beautiful, but she was undeniably attractive.
And the cause of that attraction, he thought, lay in her abounding vitality.
She seemed twice as alive as anyone in that room.
She had dark hair, and grey eyes and was of medium height. It was something in the way the hair curled crisply in her neck, in the straight glance of the grey eyes, in the curve of the cheek, in the infectious laugh that gave one that impression of riotous youth and vitality.
She stood talking to Oliver Manders, who had just arrived.
“I can’t think why sailing bores you so much.
You used to like it.”
“Egg - my dear. One grows up.” He drawled the words, raising his eyebrows.
A handsome young fellow, twenty-five at a guess.
Something, perhaps, a little sleek about his good looks. Something else - something - was it foreign? Something unEnglish about him.
Somebody else was watching Oliver Manders. A little man with an egg-shaped head and very foreign-looking moustaches.
Mr. Satterthwaite had recalled himself to M. Hercule Poirot’s memory.
The little man had been very affable.
Mr. Satterthwaite suspected him of deliberately exaggerating his foreign mannerisms.
His small twinkly eyes seemed to say,
“You expect me to be the buffoon?
To play the comedy for you?