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ightness that a woman puts on when she is dodging a moral obligation. He was terrified of her. He
could not even look her in the face. She took up a box of cigarettes and offered him one, but he
refused it. His hand was shaking too much to take it.
‘I’ve brought you that skin,’ he said flatly.
He unrolled it on the table they had just picked up. Itlooked so shabby and miserable that he wished
he had never brought it. She came close to him to examine the skin, so close that her flowerlike cheek
was not a foot from his own, and he could feel the warmth of her body. So great was his fear of her
that he stepped hurriedly away. And in the same moment she too stepped back with a wince of
disgust, having caught the foul odour of the skin. It shamed him terribly. It was almost as though it had
been himself and not the skin that stank.
‘Thank you ever so much, Mr Flory!’ She had put another yard between herself and the skin. ‘Such
a lovely big skin, isn’t it?’
‘It was, but they’ve spoiled it, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh no! I shall love having it!–Are you back in Kyauk-tada for long? How dreadfully hot it must
have been in camp!’
‘Yes, it’s been very hot.’
For three minutes they actually talked of the weather. He was helpless. All that he had promised
himself to say, all his arguments and pleadings, had withered in his throat. ‘You fool, you fool,’ he
thought, ‘what are you doing? Did you come twenty miles for this? Go on, say what you came to say!
Seize her in your arms; make her listen, kick her, beat her–anything sooner than let her choke you with
this drivel!’ But it was hopeless, hopeless. Not a word could his tongue utter except futile trivialities.
How could he plead or argue, when that bright easy air of hers, that dragged every word to the level
of Club-chatter, silenced him before he spoke? Where do they learn it, that dreadful tee-heeing
brightness? In these brisk modern girls’ schools, no doubt. The piece of carrion on the table made him
more ashamed every moment. He stood there almost voiceless, lumpishly ugly with his face yellow
and creased after the sleepless night, and his birthmark like a smear of dirt.
She got rid of him after a very few minutes. ‘And now, Mr Flory, if you don’t mind, I ought really
——’
He mumbled rather than said, ‘Won’t you come out with me again some time? Walking, shooting–
something?’
‘I have so little time nowadays! All my evenings seem to be full. This evening I’m going out riding.
With Mr Verrall,’ she added.
It was possible that she added that in order to wound him. This was the first that he had heard of
her friendship with Verrall. He could not keep the dead, flat tone of envy out of his voice as he said:
‘Do you go out riding much with Verrall?’
‘Almost every evening. He’s such a wonderful horseman! And he has absolute strings of polo
ponies!’
‘Ah. And of course I have no polo ponies.’
It was the first thing he had said that even approached seriousness, and it did no more than offend
her. However, she answered him with the same gay easy air as before, and then showed him out. Mrs