I and My True Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

Robert Turner told her. “Not in looks,” he added quietly, gallantly, trying to hide his surprise as he studied the girl’s face. “Geoff used to go right into a spiral where everything seemed funny and funnier. I generally had to push him into the nearest irrigation ditch to get him normal again.” His tense manner had left him, his shoulders were relaxed, and he looked as if he might even enjoy this evening. It was an easy beginning after all, Sylvia thought. When he had entered the room, he had obviously felt that he was strictly on duty tonight. Even the way he had stood at the door—“Lieutenant Turner reporting, sir”—Sylvia turned away towards the tray of drinks in order to hide her smile.
    “Bob, would you fix the cocktails?” she called back to him, heartlessly interrupting the questions and answers about Geoff and Korea. We’ve the entire evening for talk, she thought; let’s not exhaust the bond-in-common all in the first five minutes. And then went to welcome Martin and Amy Clark and then bring them over to Kate.
    Amy Clark was a sweetly pretty woman of about thirty, a round-faced plump little blonde with anxious grey eyes and a hesitant smile. She wore a brocade jacket over her black dinner dress, partly to disguise what she had worn with so many variations for the last four years, partly to hide a waistline straining with her last month of pregnancy. Martin Clark was of middle height, broad-shouldered, square-faced, reddish-fair hair rapidly leaving a high forehead, blue-eyed, firm-mouthed. His smile was guarded, but his handshake was friendly enough, and then he went over to help Bob Turner with the drinks.
    Amy chose that moment to say, “Look, Sylvia. Isn’t it awful?” She lifted the brocaded jacket and then let it drop again.
    Sylvia caught a glimpse of an opened side-seam hastily stitched with black thread, that gaped and showed a good deal of Amy.
    “I only discovered I wouldn’t get into it, tonight—just as I was getting ready to come here,” Amy said. “You should have seen me at seven o’clock stitching frenziedly. So if I start coming apart, I’ll give you a sign and you can take me upstairs and put me together again.” She sighed, shaking her head.
    “That’s the latest style, I’m told,” Sylvia said. “In swimsuits. So you’re only adapting a new fashion, Amy.”
    “Or a very old one,” Kate said, and wondered too late whether she had been included in this conversation. “You remember the picture of St. Anne? The one where the Virgin and she are comparing notes?”
    “What’s this?” Martin Clark asked, bringing a glass of fruit juice for his wife. “Discussing Van Eyck’s school at this stage of the evening?”
    “Oh, Kate’s the picture specialist in the Jerold family,” Sylvia said. “She graduated in Fine Arts—is that the right phrase, Kate?—at Berkeley.”
    “Would you take it as a compliment if I said that was very hard to believe?” a strange voice asked. It belonged to a dark-haired man of medium height who had come quietly into the room. His face was broad, with a high aquiline nose and a jutting chin, and there seemed to be a perpetual touch of amusement hovering around his full red lips. His eyes were dark, observant; at this moment, they were smiling too.
    “Not,” Kate said, “if you mean that we don’t study art in California.”
    “Quick, she’s quick,” the stranger said approvingly. “I’m Stewart Hallis, by the way. I live just across the street, and this is one of the houses I can walk into unannounced. So I do. Frequently. Sylvia doesn’t even bother to say hallo to me any more.”
    “Hallo, Stewart,” Sylvia said.
    “Hallo, darling.” He kissed her hand. “Hallo, Amy. Clark...” He turned back to Kate. “Hallo, Kate.” His smile became a very personal welcome.
    “And this is Lieutenant Turner,” Sylvia said.
    “Ah yes, the Army. I must salute the Army.”
    It seemed to Kate that the Army didn’t share his