The Golden Virgin Read Online Free Page A

officer prisoners at Donnington Hall in Lincolnshire, taking with her hampers of the best comestibles from Curling and Hammer, and playing tennis with them, while her country is at war, and her husband Prime Minister!”
    “Yes, Dickie, it is all very wrong. Shall I get the chess board? Or do you feel too tired to play tonight?”
    “Oh,” he said airily. “Do not let me keep you from your duties in the house next door.” Richard’s relationship with his father-in-law was one of dislike reduced to nullity. As his wife went out of the room he said, “Now, if you please! Do not be late. I want to be in bed by eleven, and cannot get to sleep until every member of this house is in bed, you know that.”
    Hetty knew that he was worried about Phillip, about whom she had gone next door, to speak to Papa. “I shan’t be long, Dickie,” as she left the room, her heart feeling lighter.
    “Let the cat in, as you go out, will you? I don’t want Zippy to catch cold, waiting in that draughty porch.”
    “Very well, Dickie.”
    Soon the cat was in the room, purring, purring, purring, to see its master again—and the warm fire.
    *
    During the years a cat had been almost the only medium by which tenderness was released in the Maddison household. There had been three cats, all called Zippy. Zippy never upset anyone, by interfering. Having security from want, fear, and entanglement by sex, Zippy was always in the same mood. In the short days of the duller half of the year Zippy followed the sun around the house, from one resting place behind glass, to another; cushion, chair, window sill, top of wicker dirty-clothes-basket, table beside balcony window. In the season of light, Zippy lived a country gentleman’s life. His landed property was the garden and part of the Backfield, where sparrows, mice, frogs, moths, and daddy-long-legs existed for the chase. A surgical operation long forgotten and preceded by a howl of finality had spared Zippy the pangs and aspirations of love; and being nimble, Zippy wasgenerally able to avoid the periodical clashes with female cats, which smacked the neuter’s face if Zippy did not immediately flee from their insults and oaths. So Zippy took it out of small birds and mammals, which it left bedraggled and maimed when it had had what Richard, often expressing impatience with what he called his wife’s sentimentality, described as its sport.
    Had Hetty shown less obvious distress, less melting pity when smaller, weaker things were hurt and despairing, it is possible that her husband would have been less critical of her so-called sentimentality. He had been brought up in the country, and knew the balancings of nature, of life and death. A bird taking a butterfly, a cat the bird in its turn, should be outside a man’s feelings. Privately, he preferred that the cat should run after what he called his drag—a rabbit’s foot tied to string.
    Now, taking the lure from his desk, Richard and the cat played together. The chase went on for several minutes around the bulbous mahogany legs of the table, under the mahogany bookcase, the gramophone stand, over the chairs. Finally the string was fastened to the handle of the door, so that the furry foot hung clear of the carpet. Thus the game was rounded off, until the cat had had enough, and went back to its place, to tuck paws under before the fire; then Richard untied the lure, and locked it away until the next time.
    *
    Mavis looked back as she crossed the humped bridge over river and railway, and saw that Ching was following her. She felt disgust. He had written letters to her; she suspected that he waited in the grass behind the garden fence, to watch her when she went to bed in the end room. Where poor, gentle Alfred Hawkins had once crept, to leave little poems for her in a crack of one of the posts. Until——
    She put away the terrible childhood scene that Phillip had been responsible for.
    Mavis hurried on, to escape Ching’s attentions. He kept