Perhaps that was not astonishing. If you had not thought about, say, washable distemper for two years and then thought about it for ten minutes you could think a hell of a lot about it in those ten minutes. Probably all there was to think. Still, of course, washable distemper was not like the poor—always with you. At least it always was in those cloisters, but not spiritually. On the other hand you always were with yourself!
But perhaps you were not always with yourself spiritually; you went on explaining how to breathe without thinking of how the life you were leading was influencing your … What? Immortal soul? Aura? Personality? … Something!
Well, for two years. … Oh, call it two years, for goodness’ sake, and get it over! … she must have been in … well, call that a “state of suspended animation” and get that over too! A sort of what they called inhibition. She had been inhibiting—prohibiting—herself from thinking about herself. Well, hadn’t she been right? What had a b⸺y Pro-German to think about in an embattled, engrossed, clamouring nation: especially when she had not much liked her brother-Pro’s! A solitary state, only to be dissolved by … maroons! In suspension!
But … Be conscientious with yourself, my good girl! When that telephone blew you out of its mouth you knew really that for two years you had been avoiding wondering whether you had not been insulted! Avoiding wondering that. And nothing else! No other qualified thing!
She had, of course, been, not in suspension, but in suspense. Because, if he made a sign—“I understand,” Edith Ethel had said, “that you have not been in correspondence” … or had it been “in communication” that she had said? … Well, they hadn’t been either. …
Anyhow, if that grey Problem, that ravelled ball of grey knitting worsted, had made a sign she would have known that she had not been insulted. Or was there any sense in that?
Was it really true that if a male and female of the same species were alone in a room together and the male didn’t … then it was an insult? That was an idea that did not exist in a girl’s head without someone to put it there, but once it had been put there it became a luminous veracity! It had been put into her, Valentine Wannop’s head, naturally by Edith Ethel, who equally naturally said that she did not believe it, but that it was a tenet of … oh, the man’s wife! Of the idle, surpassing-the-Lily-and-Solomon-too, surprisingly svelte, tall, clean-run creature who forever on the shiny paper of illustrated journals advanced towards you with improbable strides along the railings of the Row, laughing, in company with the Honourable Somebody, second son of Lord Someone-or-other. … Edith Ethel was more refined. She had a title, whereas the other hadn’t, but she was pensive. She showed you that she had read Walter Savage Landor, and had only very lately given up wearing opaque amber beads, as affected by the later pre-Raphaelites. She was practically never in the illustrated papers, but she held more refined views. She held that there were some men who were not like that—and those, all of them, were the men to whom Edith Ethel accorded the entrée to her Afternoons. She was their Egeria! A refining influence!
The Husband of the Wife then? Once he had been allowed in Edith Ethel’s drawing-room: now he wasn’t! … Must have deteriorated!
She said to herself sharply, in her “No nonsense, there” mood:
“Chuck it. You’re in love with a married man who’s a Society wife and you’re upset because the Titled Lady has put into your head the idea that you might ‘come together again.’ After ten years!”
But immediately she protested:
“No. No. No! It isn’t that. It’s all right the habit of putting things incisively, but it’s misleading to put things too crudely.”
What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing, on the face of it, but being dragged again into that man’s intolerable worries as unfortunate machinists are dragged into wheels by belts—and all the flesh torn off their bones! Upon her word that had been her first thought. She was afraid, afraid, afraid! She suddenly appreciated the advantages of nunlike seclusion. Besides she wanted to be bashing policemen with bladders in celebration of Eleven Eleven!
That fellow—he had no furniture; he did not appear to recognise the hall porter. … Dotty. Dotty and too morally deteriorated to be admitted to drawing-room of titled lady, the frequenters of which could be trusted not to make love to you on insufficient provocation, if left alone with you. …
Her generous mind reacted painfully.
“Oh, that’s not fair!” she said.
There were all sorts of sides to the unfairness. Before this War, and, of course, before he had lent all his money to Vincent Macmaster that—that grey grizzly had been perfectly fit for the country-parsonage drawing-room of Edith Ethel Duchemin: he had been welcomed there with effusion! … After the War and when his money was—presumably exhausted, and his mind exhausted, for he had no furniture and did not know the porter. … After the War, then, and when his money was exhausted he was not fit for the Salon of Lady Macmaster—the only Lady to have a Salon in London.
It was what you called kicking down your ladder!
Obviously it had to be done. There were such a lot of these bothering War heroes that if you let them all into your Salon it would cease to be a Salon, particularly if you were under obligations to them! … That was already a pressing national problem: it was going to become an overwhelming one now—in twenty minutes time; after those maroons. The impoverished War Heroes would all be coming back. Innumerable. You would have to tell
