LITMIR.BIZ

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was dull fish, Kitty thought; the plates were half cold. It was stale bread she thought, cut in meagre little squares; the colour, the gaiety of Prestwich Terrace was still in her eyes, in her ears. She granted, as she looked round, the superiority of the Lodge china and silver; and the Japanese plates and the picture had been hideous; but this dining-room with its hanging creepers and its vast cracked canvases was so dark. At Prestwich Terrace the room was full of light; the sound of hammer, hammer, hammer still rang in her ears. She looked out at the fading greens in the garden. For the thousandth time she echoed her childish wish that the tree would either lie down or stand up instead of doing neither. It was not actually raining, but gusts of whiteness seemed to blow about the garden as the wind stirred the thick leaves on the laurels.

      “Didn’t you notice it?” Mrs Malone suddenly appealed to her.

      “What, Mama?” Kitty asked. She had not been attending.

      “The odd taste in the fish,” said her mother.

      “I don’t think I did,” she said; and Mrs Malone went on talking to the butler. The plates were changed; another dish was brought in. But Kitty was not hungry. She bit one of the green sweets that were provided for her, and then the modest dinner, retrieved for the ladies from the relics of last night’s party, was over and she followed her mother into the drawing-room.

      It was too big when they were alone, but they always sat there. The pictures seemed to be looking down at the empty chairs, and the empty chairs seemed to be looking up at the pictures. The old gentleman who had ruled the college over a hundred years ago seemed to vanish in the daytime, but he came back when the lamps were lit. The face was placid, solid and smiling, and singularly like Dr. Malone, who, had a frame been set round him, might have hung over the fireplace too.

      “It’s nice to have a quiet evening once in a way,” Mrs Malone was saying, “though the Fripps…” Her voice tailed off as she put on her spectacles and took up The Times. This was her moment of relaxation and recuperation after the day’s work. She suppressed a little yawn as she glanced up and down the columns of the newspaper.

      “What a charming man he was,” she observed casually, as she looked at the births and deaths. “One would hardly have taken him for an American.”

      Kitty recalled her thoughts. She was thinking of the Robsons. Her mother was talking about the Fripps.

      “And I liked her too,” she said rashly. “Wasn’t she lovely?”

      “Hum—m—m. A little overdressed for my taste,” said Mrs Malone dryly. “And that accent—” she went on, looking through the paper, “I sometimes hardly understood what she said.”

      Kitty was silent. Here they differed; as they did about so many things.

      Suddenly Mrs Malone looked up:

      “Yes, just what I was saying to Bigge this morning,” she said, laying down the paper.

      “What, Mama?” said Kitty.

      “This man—in the leading article,” said Mrs Malone. She touched it with her finger.

      “‘With the best flesh, fish and fowl in the world,’” she read, “‘we shall not be able to turn them to account because we have none to cook them’—what I was saying to Bigge this morning.” She gave her quick little sigh. Just when one wanted to impress people, like those Americans, something went wrong. It had been the fish this time. She foraged for her work things, and Kitty took up the paper.

      “It’s the leading article,” said Mrs Malone. That man almost always said the very thing that she was thinking, which comforted her, and gave her a sense of security in a world which seemed to her to be changing for the worse.

      “‘Before the rigid and now universal enforcement of school attendance … ?’” Kitty read out.

      “Yes. That’s it,” said Mrs Malone, opening her work-box and looking for her scissors.

      “’… the children saw a good deal of cooking which, poor as it was, yet gave them some taste and inkling of knowledge. They now see nothing and they do nothing but read, write, sum, sew or knit,’” Kitty read out.

      “Yes, yes,” said Mrs Malone. She unrolled the long strip of embroidery upon which she was working a design of birds pecking at fruit copied from a tomb at Ravenna. It was for the spare bedroom.

      The leading article bored Kitty with its pompous fluency. She searched the paper for some little piece of news that might interest her mother. Mrs Malone liked someone to talk to her or read aloud to her as she worked. Night after night her embroidery served to weave the after-dinner talk into a pleasant harmony. One said something and stitched; looked at the design, chose another coloured silk, and stitched again. Sometimes Dr Malone read poetry aloud—Pope: Tennyson. Tonight she would have liked Kitty to talk to her. But she was becoming increasingly conscious of difficulty with Kitty. Why? She glanced at her. What was wrong? she wondered. She gave her quick little sigh.

      Kitty turned over the large pages. Sheep had the fluke; Turks wanted religious liberty; there was the General Election.

      “Mr Gladstone—” she began.

      Mrs Malone had lost her scissors. It annoyed her.

      “Who can have taken them again?” she began. Kitty went down on the floor to look for them. Mrs Malone ferreted in the work-box; then she plunged her hand into the fissure between the cushion and the chair frame and brought up not only the scissors but also a little mother-of-pearl paper-knife that had been missing for ever so long. The discovery annoyed her. It proved Ellen never shook up the cushions properly.

      “Here they are, Kitty,” she said. They were silent. There was always some constraint between them now.

      “Did you enjoy your party at the Robsons’, Kitty?” she asked, resuming her embroidery. Kitty did not answer. She turned the paper.

      “There’s been an experiment,” she said. “An experiment with electric light. ‘A brilliant light,’” she read, “‘was seen to shoot forth suddenly shooting out a profound ray across the water to the Rock. Everything was lit up as if by daylight.’” She paused. She saw the bright light from the ships on the drawing-room chair. But here the door opened and Hiscock came in with a note on a salver.

      Mrs Malone took it and read it in silence.

      “No answer,” she said. From the tone of her mother’s voice Kitty knew that something had happened. She sat holding the note in her hand. Hiscock shut the door.

      “Rose is dead!” said Mrs Malone. “Cousin Rose.”

      The note lay open on her knee.

      “It’s from Edward,” she said.

      “Cousin Rose is dead?” said Kitty. A moment before she had been thinking of a bright light on a red rock. Now everything looked dingy. There was a pause. There was silence. Tears stood in her mother’s eyes.

      “Just when the children most wanted her,” she said, sticking the needle into her embroidery. She began to roll it up very slowly. Kitty folded The Times and laid it on a little table, slowly, so that it should not crackle. She had only seen Cousin Rose once or twice. She felt awkward.

      “Fetch me my engagement book,” said her mother at last. Kitty brought it.

      “We must put off our dinner on Monday,” said Mrs Malone, looking through her engagements.

      “And the Lathoms’ party on Wednesday,” Kitty murmured, looking over her mother’s shoulder.

      “We can’t put off everything,” said her mother sharply, and Kitty felt rebuked.

      But there were notes to be written. She wrote them at her mother’s dictation.

      Why is she so ready to put off all our engagements? thought Mrs Malone, watching her write. Why doesn’t she enjoy going out with me any more? She glanced through the notes that her daughter

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