The Immortal Moment by May Sinclair — Read

Five days passed. The Lucys had now been a week at Southbourne. They knew it well by that time, for bad weather kept them from going very far beyond it. Jane had found, too, that they had to know some of the visitors. The little Cliff Hotel brought its guests together with a geniality unknown to its superb rival, the Metropole. Under its roof, in bad weather, persons not otherwise incompatible became acquainted with extraordinary rapidity. People had begun already to select each other. Even Mr. Soutar, the clergyman, had emerged from his lonely gloom, and dined by preference at the same table with the middle-aged ladies -- the table farthest from the bay window. The Hankins, out of pure kindness, had taken pity on the old lady, Mrs. Jurd. They had made advances to the Lucys, perceiving an agreeable social affinity, and had afterward drawn back. For the Lucys were using the opportunity of the weather for cultivating Mrs. Tailleur.

It was not easy, they told themselves, to get to know her. She did not talk much. But as Jane pointed out to Robert, little things came out, things that proved that she was all right. Her father was a country parson, very strait-laced, they gathered; and she had little sisters, years younger than herself. When she talked at all it was in a pretty, innocent way, like a child's, and all her little legends were, you could see, transparently consistent. They had, like a child's, a quite funny reiterance and simplicity. But, like a child, she was easily put off by any sort of interruption. When she thought she had let herself go too far, she would take fright and avoid them for the rest of the day, and they had to begin all over again with her next time.