Загадочные события во Франчесе / The Franchise Affair

That wonderful shading of grey into hazel. And the way her eyebrows lie above them, like the brush-mark of a painter genius. Winged eyebrows, they are. I made a poem about them on the way home. Do you want to hear it?”

“No,” Robert said firmly. “Did you enjoy your film?”

“Oh, I didn’t go.”

“You didn’t go!”

“I told you I had tea with Marion instead.”

“You mean you have been at The Franchise the whole afternoon!”

“I suppose I have,” Nevil said dreamily, “but, by God, it didn’t seem more than seven minutes.

“And what happened to your thirst for French cinema?”

“But Marion is French film. Even you must see that!” Robert winced at the “even you.” “Why bother with the shadow, when you can be with the reality? Reality. That is her great quality, isn’t it? I’ve never met anyone as real as Marion is.”

“Not even Rosemary?” Robert was in the state known to Aunt Lin as “put out.”

“Oh, Rosemary is a darling, and I’m going to marry her, but that is quite a different thing.

“Is it?” said Robert, with deceptive meekness.

“Of course. People don’t marry women like Marion Sharpe, any more than they marry winds and clouds. Any more than they marry Joan of Arc. It’s positively blasphemous to consider marriage in relation to a woman like that. She spoke very nicely of you, by the way.”

“That was kind of her.”

The tone was so dry that even Nevil caught the flavour of it.

“Don’t you like her?” he asked, pausing to look at his cousin in surprised disbelief.

Robert had ceased for the moment to be kind, lazy, tolerant Robert Blair; he was just a tired man who hadn’t yet had his dinner and was suffering from the memory of a frustration and a snubbing.

“As far as I am concerned,” he said, “Marion Sharpe is just a skinny woman of forty who lives with a rude old mother in an ugly old house, and needs legal advice on occasion like anyone else.

But even as the words came out he wanted to stop them, as if they were a betrayal of a friend.

“No, probably she isn’t your cup of tea,” Nevil said tolerantly. “You have always preferred them a little stupid, and blond, haven’t you.” This was said without malice, as one stating a dullish fact.

“I can’t imagine why you should think that.”

“All the women you nearly married were that type.