Part 29 (1/2)

Noel looked hard at her for a moment, and then did not pretend to misunderstand her meaning.

”What, us being engaged?”

His intuitive comprehension, of which Alex had received so little proof ever before, might be unflattering, but it struck her with immense relief.

”Yes.”

They gazed at each other in silence for a few moments, and Alex was furious with herself for a phrase sprung from nowhere that reiterated itself in her brain as she looked at Noel's handsome, inexpressive face--”_Fish-like flaccidity_....”

And again and again ”_Fish-like flaccidity._”

They were in the drawing-room at Clevedon Square, and Noel, as though seeking to relieve his obvious embarra.s.sment by moving, got up and walked across the room to the window.

”Of course, I've felt for some time that you weren't very happy about it all, and naturally--if you feel like that....”

All the seething disappointment and wounded vanity and aching loneliness that had tortured her since the very first moments of her engagement to Noel Cardew, rushed back on Alex, but she sought vainly for words in which to convey any part of her feelings to him.

It would be like trying to explain some abstruse principle of science to a little child. The sense of the utter uselessness of any attempt at making clear to him the reasons which were chaotic even to herself, paralysed Alex' utterance.

”I don't think it's any use going on,” she repeated feebly.

”You're perfectly free,” Noel a.s.sured her scrupulously; ”and though, of course, I--I--I--you--we--it would be--” He broke off, very red.

Alex wished vaguely that it was possible for them to talk it all out quite frankly and dispa.s.sionately with one another, but the hard, crystalline detachment of the generation that was to follow theirs, had as yet no place in the scheme of things known to Noel and Alex.

They made awkward, conventional phrases to one another.

”Naturally,” the boy said with an effort, ”the whole blame must rest with me.”

”Oh, no, I'll tell father and mother that I wanted to--to--break it off.”

Alex stopped, conscious that she could not think of anything else to say.

But rather to her surprise, it appeared that Noel had something else to say.

He faced her with hands thrust into his pockets, his hair and little, fair moustache and his brown eyes looking very light indeed contrasted with his flushed face.

”Of course, you're absolutely free, as I said, only I must say, Alex, that you're making rather a mistake. Every one was awfully pleased about it, and we've known each other since we were kids--since _you_ were a kid, at any rate--and a broken engagement--well, of course, I don't want to say anything, naturally, but it _does_ put a girl in a--a--well, in what's called rather an invidious position. Especially when it isn't as though there was any particular reason for it.”

”The princ.i.p.al reason--” Alex began faintly, not altogether certain of what it was that she was about to say.

”You see, I always thought we should hit it off together so well. We always did as kids--when you were a kid, I mean,” Noel explained. ”We always seemed to like the same things, and have a good deal in common.”

”I don't think that you liked any of the things _I_ cared about especially,” Alex said, with a flash of spirit.

”What does that matter?” Noel demanded navely, ”so long as one of us likes the things that the other does? It would be exactly the same thing.”

Alex had never told herself, and was therefore quite unable to tell Noel, that she had never liked anything particularly, except his liking for her, which she had striven almost frenziedly to gain and retain by means of an artificially-stimulated display of sympathetic interest in his enthusiasms.

”There's another thing--I don't know whether I ought to say it to you, quite--but, of course, after one's--well, married--there's a lot more one has in common, naturally.”