Page:Thunder on the Left (1925).djvu/131

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saying stone), "the ideas I thought you have to leave behind when you go bathing in the river of life, I think maybe I shall go back and look under that stone for them and see if they aren't the most important of all. I thought they were just clothes. Maybe they were my bathing suit."

The figure of speech wasn't quite limpid. There was perhaps a little asti spumante in it, and a few gassy bubbles of exaggeration. But she understood what he meant. Ten, eleven years older than she, how young he seemed.

He paused a while, getting younger every moment. He waved away a drift of smoke.

"You must meet Phyllis," he said.

Then he had found, later, that it wasn't necessary, for she had known Phyllis as a child. How small the world is, he said sadly. "Phyllis and I were small, too," she replied.

She wondered if there were four Phyllises also?

"Ten minutes to Dark Harbour," said Godiva's porter, coming into the vestibule with his whisk brush. She hardly noticed him dusting her, she was thinking of George the Fourth, the perplexing phantom she had accidentally startled into life. She felt for him a strange, almost maternal ten-