A Matter of Chance. Betty Neels
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over yet, and I’m not kind. I felt like company.’
Her pleasure in the day evaporated and gave way to temper, so that she said tartly: ‘How convenient for you that I accepted your invitation, although now that I come to think about it, you didn’t invite me—you took it for granted that I’d come.’ She added sweetly, ‘Pray don’t expect that a second time.’
‘Who said anything about a second time?’ he wanted to know silkily, and put his foot down hard, so that the Bentley shot forward at a pace to make her catch her breath. Nothing would have made her ask him to drive more slowly, so she sat as still as a mouse and as stiff as a poker until he remarked carelessly: ‘It’s all right, you don’t need to be frightened.’
If it had been physically possible, she would have liked to box his ears for him.
They left Afsluitdijk behind them and he slowed the car through Franeker and Leeuwarden and slowed it still more as they neared the village. Cressida, mindful of her manners, had sustained a conversation throughout the latter part of their journey; she would dearly have loved to sulk, but that would have been childish and got her nowhere; dignity was the thing. It made her sit up very straight beside him and talk nothings in a high voice, hurrying from one harmless topic to the next, giving him no time to do more than answer briefly to each well-tried platitude which passed her lips. Dignity, too, helped her to mount the steps to the front door beside him, still talking, to pause at the door and plunge into stilted thanks which he ruthlessly interrupted.
‘I’m not coming in,’ he told her. ‘I had thought that we might have dined together, but at the rate you are going, you would have had no social conversation left, and by the time we had finished the soup you would have been hoarse.’
Cressida’s mouth was open to speak her mind, but she didn’t get the chance. ‘My fault,’ he said, and didn’t tell her why, and when Juffrouw Naald opened the door he turned without a word and went back to the car. Cressida went indoors feeling as though she had been dropped from a great height and had the breath knocked out of her. It wasn’t a nice sensation and she didn’t go too deeply into it. She had her supper with the two doctors and went to bed early, expecting to lie awake with her disturbing thoughts, but surprisingly she didn’t; she was conscious of only one vivid memory; Doctor van der Teile’s lonely back as he had walked away from her on the doorstep.
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