usually keen sense of
humour, our line was obviously to follow his lead.

We did so; and by degrees the fact that his life was permanently
blighted became almost a legend. At the back of our minds we were aware
of it, but it did not obtrude itself into the affairs of every day. It
was only when someone, forgetting, as Ellerton had done, tried to
enlist his sympathy for some misfortune of his own that the look of
pain in his eyes and the sudden tightening of his lips reminded us that
he still remembered.

Matters had been at this stage for perhaps two weeks when Mary Campbell
arrived.

Sex attraction is so purely a question of the taste of the individual
that the wise man never argues about it. He accepts its vagaries as
part of the human mystery, and leaves it at that. To me there was no
charm whatever about Mary Campbell. It may have been that, at the
moment, I was in love with Grace Bates, Heloise Miller, and Clarice
Wembley--for at Marois Bay, in the summer, a man who is worth his salt
is more than equal to three love affairs simultaneously--but anyway,
she left me cold. Not one thrill could she awake in me. She was small
and, to my mind, insignificant. Some men said that she had fine eyes.
They seemed to me just ordinary eyes. And her hair was just ordinary
hair. In fact, ordinary was the word that described her.

But from the first it was plain that she seemed wonderful with Wilton,
which was all the more remarkable, seeing that he was the one man of us
all who could have got any girl in Marois Bay that he wanted. When a
man is six foot high, is a combination of Hercules and Apollo, and
plays tennis, golf, and the banjo with almost superhuman vim, his path
with the girls of a summer seaside resort is pretty smooth. But, when
you add to all these things a tragedy like Wilton's, he can only be
described as having a walk-over.

Girls love a tragedy. At least, most girls do. It makes a man
interesting to them. Grace Bates was always going on about how
interesting Wilton was. So was Heloise Miller. So was Clarice Wembley.
But it was not until Mary Campbell came that he displayed any real
enthusiasm at all for the feminine element of Marois Bay. We put it
down to the fact that he could not forget, but the real reason, I now
know, was that he considered that girls were a nuisance on the links
and in the tennis-court. I suppose a plus two golfer and a Wildingesque
tennis-player, such as Wilton was, does feel like th