Directly Hewet lost
sight of her, he felt the old discomfort return, even more strongly than
before. Their talk had been interrupted in the middle, just as he was
beginning to say the things he wanted to say. After all, what had they
been able to say? He ran his mind over the things they had said, the
random, unnecessary things which had eddied round and round and used
up all the time, and drawn them so close together and flung them so far
apart, and left him in the end unsatisfied, ignorant still of what she
felt and of what she was like. What was the use of talking, talking,
merely talking?
Chapter XVII
It was now the height of the season, and every ship that came from
England left a few people on the shores of Santa Marina who drove up to
the hotel. The fact that the Ambroses had a house where one could escape
momentarily from the slightly inhuman atmosphere of an hotel was a
source of genuine pleasure not only to Hirst and Hewet, but to the
Elliots, the Thornburys, the Flushings, Miss Allan, Evelyn M., together
with other people whose identity was so little developed that the
Ambroses did not discover that they possessed names. By degrees there
was established a kind of correspondence between the two houses, the big
and the small, so that at most hours of the day one house could guess
what was going on in the other, and the words "the villa" and "the
hotel" called up the idea of two separate systems of life.
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