The Pool in the Desert

gatory and disastrous to impart without the sense of doing him some kind of injury in the mere statement. But there came a point when I could no longer listen to Dora Harris's theories to account f

macy, and my mouth was opened. She heard me without the exclamations I expected, her head bent over the pencil she was sharpening, and her silence continued after I had finished. The touch o

her pencil three times, she turne

rtnight?' she asked. 'That do

ked, and her an

r of us,'

ore than I can imagine, but the print of he

laimed. 'I couldn't help

replied, and almost-the evening light was beginning to glimmer uncertainly

moment later, 'but I do hate having

n ground less emotional, and observed on the flyleaf 'D.H. from I.A. In memory of the Hi

tly, in reply to my statement that the mare had som

good to him,' I sa

if defying contradiction, 'to a simple disl

ith all humility that she was likely to know

th firmer decision, 'have been in the lea

distinctions are less sharp than they

men in the Military Department here-he was aware of the nicest shade of their patronage. But he does not care. T

this Capua of ours knows him, or cares anything about him

preciated, even in Simla, and I think I've succeeded. He said, after those two men had gone away on Su

ou mean between

formal call. There was no

he Club. I was a little surprised. We didn't seem somehow to be on th

ith this vague comment we spoke of something else, both of u

o the studio and tell him what you have told me. Perhaps it doesn

nd see the pictures,' I urged; but

gency of one of his cigars. They were the cigars of the man who doesn't know what he eats. With sociable promptness I lighted one of my own. The little enclosed veranda testified to a wave of fresh activ

st of the day, coming along a mountain road under a dim moon. They might have been walking throu

lately. Those two studies over there simply did themselves. That camp scene on the left is almost a picture. I think I'

they had a distinct animus, at English institutions and character, particularly as these appear in English society. I could not believe, from the little I had seen of him, that his experience of English society of any degree had been intimate; what he said had the flavour of Radical Sunday papers. The only original element was the feeling behind, which was plainly part of him; speculation instantly clamoured as to how far this was purely temperamental and how far the result of painful contact. He himself, he said, though later of the Western States, had been born under the British flag of British parents-though his mother was an Irishwoman she came from loyal Ulster-and he repeated the statement as if it in some way justified his attitude towards his fellow countrym

hing that had happened to him personally; indeed, he was careful to aver preferences for the society of 'sincere' people like Strobo and Rosario, that seemed to declare him more than indifferent to circles in which he would not meet them. In the end our argument left me ridiculously irritated-it was simply distressing to see the platform from which he obtained so wide and exquisite a view of the world upheld by such flimsy pillars-and my n