"
"In the meantime, let's talk about selling automobiles, or the weather,
anything but the war," Sophie said suddenly. She pressed a button on the
wall. "We're going to drink tea and forget the war," she continued
almost defiantly. "I won't ask either of you to stay for dinner, because
I'm going out."
Carr's house sat on a slope that dipped down to a long narrow park, and
beyond that to a beach on which slow rollers from the outside broke with
a sound like the snore of a distant giant. Along that slope and away to
the eastward the city was speckled with lights, although it was barely
five o'clock, so early does dark close in in that latitude when the year
is far spent. And when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of
twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light
intermittently stabbing the murky Gulf, was shut away by drawn blinds,
and the four of them sat in the cosy room eating little cakes and
drinking tea and chatting lightly of things that bulked smaller than the
war.
Presently Sam Carr drew Tommy away to the library to look up some legal
technicality over which they had fallen into dispute. Sophie lay back
in her chair, eyes fixed on the red glow of the embers as if she saw
through them and into vast distances beyond.
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