Stroke of Lightning by John Galsworthy — Read

This was before the war, and conditions were such that the tragedies and comedies of private lives seemed still to have importance.

I had not seen my friend Frank Weymouth for some years before coming across him and his wife that Christmas at the big hotel in Heliopolis. He was always a sunny fellow with a spilt-wine look about him, which not even a house-mastership at a Public School had been able to overcome; his wife, whom I had only met twice before, surprised me a little. I remembered a quiet, rather dark little person with a doubting eye; but this was a very kitten of a woman, brimful of mischief and chaff, and always on the go -- reaction, no doubt, from the enforced decorum of a house where she was foster-mother of forty boys, in an atmosphere of being under glass and the scrutiny of intensive propriety. In our Egyptian hotel, with its soft, clever Berberine servants, its huge hall, palm-garden, and cosmopolitan guests, its golf-course with little dark, scurrying Arab caddies and the desert at its doors, Jessie Weymouth frolicked and rolled her large dark eyes, scratched and caressed us with her little paws. Life had suddenly got into her, and left its tail outside for her to chase. She dragged us all along in her gay pursuit of it; Weymouth smilingly acquiesced in her outrageous ‘goings-on. ' He knew, I suppose, that she was devoted to him, and her bark no bite. His ‘term' had been a hard one; he was in a mood of lying back, physically run down, mentally flattened out. To soak in idleness and the sun was all he seemed to care about.