DARK HESTER
dependable of hosts, and she had not so seen him for years. The contrast between his face and Captain Ingpen’s struck her anew as they sat round the candles and crystal and white napery, and it was not so much now between youth and maturity as between two different kinds of life. Clive’s face was like a high taper burning upward; Captain Ingpen’s like a half-consumed log, charred, jagged, a sullen red smouldering along its edge. How could she, even for a nightmare moment, have thought of Clive as weak, she wondered, looking across at him and noting the pure, meditative hollow cast by the reflected candlelight above the bow of his upper lip.
He and Ingpen were talking about the new book on India. ‘Things quite as grim and equally true could be written about us, couldn’t they?’ Ingpen was saying, eating his soup and glancing sideways at Clive, a hard, appraising glance. ‘I know all those festering Hindus too well, though my time has been mainly spent among the people who were destined by nature to be their destroyers—the people we prevent from preying on them.’
He was very affable, very suave, and Clive was very courteous, but already, as she listened to them, Monica felt that they were not going to like each other. Neither was Hester going to like Captain
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