The Passionate Year by James Hilton Page B

July; there was no sun, and the gas was actually
lit in the shop when he called. The boy, a smart under-sized youngster, was
there to serve him, but he asked for Miss Harrington. She must have heard his
voice, for she appeared almost straightway, dressed neatly and soberly in
black, and greeted him with a quite brisk: “Good afternoon, Mr. Speed!”
    He shook hands with her gravely and began to stammer: “I should have
called before, Miss Harrington, to offer you my sincerest sympathies,
but—”
    She held up her hand in an odd little gesture of reproof and said,
interrupting him: “Please don’t. If you want a chat come into the back room.
Thomas can attend to the shop.”
    He accepted her invitation almost mechanically. It was a small room, full
of businesslike litter such as is usual in the back rooms of shops, but a
piano and bookcase gave it a touch of individuality. As she pointed him to a
seat she said: “Don’t think me rude, but this is the place for conversation.
The shop is for buying things. You’ll know in future, won’t you?”
    He nodded somewhat vaguely. He could not determine what exactly was
astounding in her, and yet he realised that the whole effect of her was
somehow astounding. More than ever was he conscious of the subtle hostility,
by no means amounting to unfriendliness, but perhaps importing into her
regard for him a tinge of contempt.
    “Do you know,” he said, approaching the subject very deliberately, “that
until a very short time ago I knew nothing at all about Mr. Harrington? You
never told me.”
    “Why should I?” She was on her guard in an instant. He went on: “You may
think me sincere or not as you choose, but I should like to have met
him.”
    “He had a dislike of being met.”
    She said that with a touch of almost vicious asperity.
    He went on, far less daunted by her rudeness than he would have been if
she had given way to emotion of any kind: “Anyway I have got to know him as
well as I can by reading his books.”
    “What a way to get to know him!” she exclaimed, contemptuously. She looked
him sternly in the face and said: “Be frank, Mr. Speed, and admit that you
found my father’s books the most infantile trash you ever read in your
life!”
    “Miss Harrington!” he exclaimed, protesting. She rose, stood over him
menacingly, and cried: “You have your chance to be frank, mind!”
    He looked at her, tried to frame some polite reply, and found himself
saying astonishingly: “Well, to be perfectly candid, that was rather my
opinion.”
    “And mine,” she added quietly.
    She was calm in an instant. She looked at him almost sympathetically for a
moment, and with a sudden gesture of satisfaction sat down in a chair
opposite to his. “I’m glad you were frank with me, Mr. Speed,” she said. “I
can talk to anybody who’s frank with me. It’s your nature to confide in
anybody who gives yon the least encouragement, but it’s not mine I’m rather
reticent. I remember once you talked to me a lot about your own people.
Perhaps you thought it strange of me not to reciprocate.”
    “No, I never thought of it then.”
    “You didn’t?—Well, I thought perhaps you might have done. Now that
you’ve shown yourself candid I can tell you very briefly the sort of man my
father was. He was a very dear old hypocrite, and I was very fond of him. He
didn’t feel half the things he said in his books, though I think he was
honest enough to try to. He found a good thing and he stuck to it. After all,
writing books was only his trade, and a man oughtn’t to be judged entirely by
what he’s forced to do in order to make a living.”
    He stared at her half-incredulously. She was astounding him more than
ever. She went on, with a curious smile: “He was fifty-seven years old. When
he died he was half-way through his eleventh book. It was to have been called
‘How to Live to Three-Score-Years-and-Ten.’ All about eating nuts