"After all," said Marcia, "there are egoists and egoists. You are one sort of egoist, I am the other."
A ladybird had dropped on to her plate from a cluster of leaves above, and she invited it on to her finger and transferred it very carefully to the rail of the verandah.
"Differentiate," said the stranger, watching the progress of the ladybird.
They were lunching on the verandah, and the midday sun fell through a screen of leaves in quivering splashes on to the tablecloth, the elusive pattern of Marcia's dress, the crude enamelled brilliance of the salad in a willow-pattern bowl, the dinted plate and cutlery slanting together at angles of confusion. The water was spring water, so cold that a mist had formed on the sides of their tumblers and of the red glass water-jug. They considered helpings of cold lamb, and their heads and faces were in shadow.
Through the open window the interior of the coffee-room was murky and repellent; with its drab, dishevelled tables, and chairs so huddled tête-à-tête that they travestied intimacy. It was full of the musty reek of cruets and the wraiths of long-digested meals, and of a brooding reproach for their desertion whenever they turned their heads towards it. A mournful waitress, too, reproached them, flicking desultorily about among the crumbs.
From under the verandah the hotel garden slanted steeply down to the road; the burning dustiness beneath them was visible in glimpses between the branches of the lime-trees. Cyclists flashed past, and an occasional motor whirled up clouds of dust to settle in the patient limes. Behind their screen of leaves they two sat sheltered and conversant, looking out to where, beyond the village, the country fell away into the hot blue distances of June, and cooled by a faint wind that crept towards them through a rustle and glitter of leaves from hay-fields and the heavy shade of elders.
The jewels flashed in Marcia's rings as she laid down knife and fork, and, drumming with her fingers on the table, proceeded to expatiate on egoists.
"Don't think I'm going to be clever," she implored him, "and talk like a woman in a Meredith book. Well, quite baldly to begin with, one acknowledges that one puts oneself first, doesn't one? There may be other people, but it's ourselves that matter."
He had relaxed his face to a calm attentiveness, and, leaning limply back in his chair, looked at her with tired, kindly eyes, like the eyes of a monkey, between wrinkled lids.
"Granted, if you wish it for the sake of argument. But———"
"But you are protesting inwardly that the other people matter more? They do matter enormously. But the more they matter to you, still the more you're mattering to yourself; it merely raises your standard of values. Have you any children?"
"Six," said the tired man.
"I have three," said Marcia. "And a husband. Quite enough, but I am very fond of them all. That is why I am always so glad to get away from them."
He was cutting his lamb with quiet slashing strokes of his knife, and eating quickly and abstractedly, like a man whose habits of life have made food less an indulgence than a necessity. She believed that she was interesting him.
"My idea in life, my particular form of egoism, is a determination not to be swamped. I resent most fearfully, not the claims my family make on me, but the claims I make on my family. Theirs are a tribute to my indispensability, mine, a proof of my dependence. Therefore I am a perfectly charming woman, but quite extraordinarily selfish. That is how all my friends describe me. I admire their candour, but I never congratulate them on their perspicacity. My egoism is nothing if not blatant and unblushing.
"Now you go on!" she said encouragingly, helping herself to salad. "Tell me about your selfishness, then I'll define how it's different from mine."
He did not appear inspired.
"Yours is a much better kind," she supplemented. "Finer. You have given up everything but the thing that won't be given up. In fact, there's nothing wrong in your sort of egoism. It's only your self-consciousness that brings it to life at all. In the middle of your abject and terrible unselfishness you feel a tiny strain of resistance, and it worries you so much that it has rubbed you sore. It's mere morbidity on your part, that's what I condemn about it. Turn your family out into the street and carouse for a fortnight and you'll be a better man at the end of it. Mine is healthy animal spirits, mine is sheer exuberance; yours is a badgered, hectic, unavowed resistance to the people you love best in the world because, unknowingly, you still love yourself better."
"You wouldn't know the meaning of healthy animal spirits with six children on my income. I suppose what you are trying to say about me, is . . . the turning of the worm?"
"No," said Marcia, "not exactly turning. I wonder if I am making a fool of myself? I don't believe you are an egoist at all. My ideas are beginning to desert me; I am really incapable of a sustained monologue on any subject under the sun. You see, generally I talk in circles; I mean, I say something cryptic, that sounds clever and stimulates the activities of other people's minds, and when the conversation has reached a climax of brilliancy I knock down my hammer, like an auctioneer, on somebody else's epigram, cap it with another, and smile round at them all with calm assurance and finality. By that time everybody is in a sort of glow, each believing that he or she has laid the largest and finest of the conversational eggs.
"Goodness, you've finished. Would you just call through the window and ask that woman if there's anything else to eat? She's been taking such an interest in our conversation and our profiles. Say strawberries if possible, because otherwise I have a premonition it will be blancmange."
The stranger put his head and shoulders through the window. Marcia studied his narrow back in the shabby tweed jacket, his thinning hair and the frayed edges of his collar. One hand gripped the back of his chair; she thought, "How terrible to see a man who isn't sunburnt." She listened to his muffled conversation with the waitress, and pushed her plate away, deploring the oiliness of the salad.
With flushed face he reappeared, and two plump arms came through the window after him, removed their plates, and clattered on to the table a big bowl of strawberries and a small greyish blancmange in a thick glass dish.
"I wonder if I'm tiring you," said Marcia remorsefully. "I know you came out here to be quiet, and I've done nothing but sharpen my theories on you ever since we made common cause against the coffee-room—it was worth while, too, wasn't it? Never mind, I'll let you go directly after lunch, and you shall find the tranquillity you came to look for underneath a lime-tree loud with bees. (I never take the slightest interest in Nature, but I always remember that touch about the bees. I came across it in a book.) I see a book in your pocket. If I wasn't here you'd be reading with it propped up against the water-jug, blissfully dipping your strawberries into the salt and wondering why they tasted so funny. But do let's eat them in our fingers, anyway. I never eat them with a spoon unless there's cream. . . . My husband says he finds me too exhilarating for a prolonged tête-à-tête."
He smiled at her with embarrassment, then leant his elbow on the warm rail of the verandah and looked down on to the road.
"It's so hot," he said with sudden petulance, "so beastly hot. I didn't realise how hot it was going to be or I wouldn't have bicycled out."
"It's not very hot here, is it? Those leaves———"
"No, but I was thinking about the hotness everywhere else. This makes it worse."
"Fancy bicycling. Do let me give you some blancmange; I think it is an heirloom. Did you come far?"
"From Lewisham." He added, "I work in a publisher's office."
"A publisher—how interesting. I wonder if you could do anything to help a boy I know; such a charming boy! He has written a book, but———"
He flushed. "I am not a—an influential member of the firm."
"Oh, then, p'raps you couldn't. Tell me, why did you come here to-day? I mean why here specially?"
"Oh, for no reason. Just at random. Why did you?"
"To meet somebody who hasn't turned up. He was going to have brought a lunch-basket and we were to have picnicked down by the river. Oh, nobody I shouldn't meet. You haven't blundered into an elopement. I've got no brain for intrigue. After lunch we were going to have sketched—at least, he would have sketched and I should have talked. He's by way of teaching me. We were to have met at twelve, but I suppose he's forgotten or is doing something else. Probably he wired, but it hadn't come before I started."
"Do you paint?"
"I've got a paint-box." She indicated a diminutive Windsor and Newton and a large water-colour block lying at her feet.
"I'm sorry," he said diffidently. "I'm afraid this must be something of a disappointment."
"Not a bit." She clasped her hands on the table, leaning forward. "I've really loved our lunch-party. You listened. I've met very few people who could really listen."
"I've met very few people who were worth listening to."
She raised her brows. Her shabby man was growing gallant.
"I am certain," she smiled, "that with your delicate perceptions of the romantic you would rather we remained incognito. Names and addresses are———"
"Banality."
The leaves rustled and her muslins fluttered in a breath of warm wind. In silence they turned their faces out towards the distance.
"I love views," she said, "when there isn't anything to understand in them. There are no subtleties of emotion about June. She's so gloriously elemental. Not a month for self-justification, simply for self-abandonment."
He turned towards her quickly, his whole face flushed and lighted up for speech.
With a grind and screech of brakes a big car drew up under the lime-trees.
Marcia leaned over the verandah rail.
"John," she cried. "Oh, John!"
She reached out for her parasol and dived to gather up her sketching things.
"How late you are," she called again, "how late you are! Did you have a puncture, or what were you doing?"
She pushed back her chair with a grating sound along the tiled floor of the verandah, and stood looking down bright-eyed at his weary, passive, disillusioned face.
"I was right," she said, "there are two sorts of egoists, and I am both."