“It’s no use tackling Rosalind,” Pamela agreed. “She’ll never change her spots. … Do you suppose it’s true about Nan?”
“I daresay it is. Yes, I’m afraid I do think it’s quite likely true. … Nan was so queer the few times I saw her after Gerda’s accident. I was unhappy about her. She was so hard, and so more than usually cynical and unget-at-able. She told me it had been all her fault, leading Gerda into mischief, doing circus tricks that the child tried to emulate and couldn’t. I couldn’t read her, quite. Her tone about Gerda had a queer edge to it. And she rather elaborately arranged, I thought, so that she shouldn’t meet Barry. Pamela, do you think she had finally and absolutely turned Barry down before he took up so suddenly with Gerda, or. …”
Pamela said, “I know nothing. She told me nothing. But I rather thought, when she came to see me just before she went down to Cornwall, that she had made up her mind to have him. I may have been wrong.”
Neville leant her forehead on her hands and sighed.
“Or you may have been right. And if you were right, it’s the ghastliest tragedy—for her. … Oh, I shouldn’t have let Gerda go and work with him; I should have known better. … Nan had rebuffed him, and he flew off at a tangent, and there was Gerda sitting in his office, as pretty as flowers and with her funny little silent charm. … And if Nan was all the time waiting for him, meaning to say yes when he asked her. … Poor darling Nan, robbed by my horrid little girl, who doesn’t even want to marry. … If that’s the truth, it would account for the Stephen Lumley business. Nan wouldn’t stay on in London, to see them together. If Lumley caught her at that psychological moment, she’d very likely go off with him, out of mere desperation and bravado. That would be so terribly like Nan. … What a desperate, wry, cursed business life is. … On the other hand, she may just be going about with Lumley on her own terms not his. It’s her own affair whichever way it is; what we’ve got to do is to contradict the stories Rosalind is spreading whenever we get the chance. Not that one can scotch scandal once it starts—particularly Rosalind’s scandal.”
“Ignore it. Nan can ignore it when she comes back. It won’t hurt her. Nan’s had plenty of things said about her before, true and untrue, and never cared.”
“You’re splendid at the ignoring touch, Pam. I believe there’s nothing you can’t and don’t ignore.”
“Well, why not? Ignoring’s easy.”
“Not for most of us. I believe it is, for you. In a sense you ignore life itself; anyhow you don’t let it hold and bully you. When your time comes you’ll ignore age, and later death.”
“They don’t matter much, do they? Does anything? I suppose it’s my stolid temperament, but I can’t feel that it does.”
Neville thought, as she had often thought before, that Pamela, like Nan, only more calmly, less recklessly and disdainfully, had the aristocratic touch. Pamela, with her delicate detachments and her light, even touch on things great and small, made her feel fussy and petty and excitable.
“I suppose you’re right, my dear. … ‘All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for the things that are arise out of the unreasonable. …’ I must get back. Give my love to Frances … and when next you see Gerda do try to persuade her that marriage is one of the things that don’t matter and that she might just as well put up with to please us all. The child is a little nuisance—as obstinate as a mule.”
IV
Neville, walking away from Pamela’s grimy street in the November fog, felt that London was terrible. An ugly clamour of strident noises and hard, shrill voices, jabbering of vulgar, trivial things. A wry, desperate, cursed world, as she had called it, a pot seething with bitterness and all dreadfulness, with its Rosalinds floating on the top like scum.
And Nan, her Nan, her little vehement sister, whom she had mothered of old, had pulled out of countless scrapes—Nan had now taken her life into her reckless hands and done what with it? Given it, perhaps, to a man she didn’t love, throwing cynical defiance thereby at love, which had hurt her; escaping from the intolerable to the shoddy. Even if not, even supposing the best, Nan was hurt and in trouble; Neville was somehow sure of that. Men were blind fools; men were fickle children. Neville almost wished now that Barry would give up Gerda and go out to Rome and fetch Nan back. But, to do that, Barry would have to fall out of love with Gerda and into love again with Nan; and even Barry, Neville imagined, was not such a weathercock as that. And Barry would really be happier with Gerda. With all their
