“Oh, never mind,” she said, “if you’ve been thinking about Aunt Beatrice for the last ten minutes you won’t want to talk about her now. Come and have a game of tennis.”
And she jumped up from her seat and walked up towards the house. Roland felt, as he prepared to follow her, that it was an abrupt way to end a conversation that she had forced on him.
And that night, as he undressed, Roland had to own to himself that altogether it had not been a satisfactory day. There had been the incident at the breakfast table, the rebuff on the croquet lawn, the coldness that had arisen between himself and Muriel, and then, although he had done fairly well in the cricket match, he had not achieved the goal which, he had to confess, had been his great incentive to prowess--namely, the approval of Beatrice.
He had made twenty-seven in the first innings--a good twenty-seven, all things considered. He had had two yorkers in his first over. He had played a large part in the gradual wearing down of the bowling, that had paved the way for some heavy hitting by the tail. He had made several very pretty shots. There had been that late cut off the fast bowler--a beauty; he had come down on it perfectly, and it had gone past second slip out of reach of the third man for three; and then there had been that four off the slow bowler who had tied up Gerald so completely; he had played him quite confidently. Mr. Marston had, indeed, complimented him on the way he had placed the short-pitched balls in front of short-square for singles. It had been a pretty useful innings, but though he had kept turning his eyes in the direction of the pavilion, and especially to the shaded side of it, where the ladies reclined in deck-chairs, he had failed to discover any manifestation of excitement, pleasure or even interest on the part of Beatrice in his achievements. True, he had once seen her hands meet in a desultory clap, but that clap had rewarded what was, after all, a comparatively simple hit, a half-volley outside the off stump that he had hit past cover to the boundary, and as that solitary clap came a full thirty seconds after the rest of the pavilion had begun clapping, and ceased a good thirty seconds before anyone else clapping in the pavilion ceased, he was obliged to feel that the applause was more the acquittal of a social duty than any recognition of his own prowess, and when he was finally given leg before to a ball, that would certainly have passed a foot above the stumps, she did not smile at him with congratulations nor did she attempt to console him, though he gave her every opportunity of doing so had she wished by walking round three sides of a rectangle, and reaching the dressing-room by means of the shaded lawn on the left of the pavilion. No. His cricket had not interested her in the least, and it was exasperating to see her face kindle with enthusiasm when the wicket keeper and the slow bowler put on fifty runs for the last wicket through a series of the most outrageous flukes that have ever disgraced a cricket field.