LITMIR.BIZ

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to keep her attention fixed upon the “Prelude.” Was it Susan Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly, and then turned out the light.

      Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in shape as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book, Susan Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages have consecrated this hour, and the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk of love between women; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk; she could only look with extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that; and then withdrew a pace or two, and considered herself seriously.

      “I’m nice-looking,” she determined. “Not pretty—possibly,” she drew herself up a little. “Yes—most people would say I was handsome.”

      She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was. Her feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to herself that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done the day before.

      “He didn’t ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,” she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age, and owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage. The hour of confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red lying upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined, but her serious anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.

      She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed, “Oh, but I’m forgetting,” and went to her writing-table. A brown volume lay there stamped with the figure of the year. She proceeded to write in the square ugly hand of a mature child, as she wrote daily year after year, keeping the diaries, though she seldom looked at them.

      “A.M.—Talked to Mrs. H. Elliot about country neighbours. She knows the Manns; also the Selby-Carroways. How small the world is! Like her. Read a chapter of Miss Appleby’s Adventure to Aunt E. P.M.—Played lawn-tennis with Mr. Perrott and Evelyn M. Don’t like Mr. P. Have a feeling that he is not ‘quite,’ though clever certainly. Beat them. Day splendid, view wonderful. One gets used to no trees, though much too bare at first. Cards after dinner. Aunt E. cheerful, though twingy, she says. Mem.: ask about damp sheets.”

      She knelt in prayer, and then lay down in bed, tucking the blankets comfortably about her, and in a few minutes her breathing showed that she was asleep. With its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations it resembled that of a cow standing up to its knees all night through in the long grass.

      A glance into the next room revealed little more than a nose, prominent above the sheets. Growing accustomed to the darkness, for the windows were open and showed grey squares with splinters of starlight, one could distinguish a lean form, terribly like the body of a dead person, the body indeed of William Pepper, asleep too. Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight—here were three Portuguese men of business, asleep presumably, since a snore came with the regularity of a great ticking clock. Thirty-nine was a corner room, at the end of the passage, but late though it was—“One” struck gently downstairs—a line of light under the door showed that some one was still awake.

      “How late you are, Hugh!” a woman, lying in bed, said in a peevish but solicitous voice. Her husband was brushing his teeth, and for some moments did not answer.

      “You should have gone to sleep,” he replied. “I was talking to Thornbury.”

      “But you know that I never can sleep when I’m waiting for you,” she said.

      To that he made no answer, but only remarked, “Well then, we’ll turn out the light.” They were silent.

      The faint but penetrating pulse of an electric bell could now be heard in the corridor. Old Mrs. Paley, having woken hungry but without her spectacles, was summoning her maid to find the biscuit-box. The maid having answered the bell, drearily respectful even at this hour though muffled in a mackintosh, the passage was left in silence. Downstairs all was empty and dark; but on the upper floor a light still burnt in the room where the boots had dropped so heavily above Miss Allan’s head. Here was the gentleman who, a few hours previously, in the shade of the curtain, had seemed to consist entirely of legs. Deep in an arm-chair he was reading the third volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of Rome by candle-light. As he read he knocked the ash automatically, now and again, from his cigarette and turned the page, while a whole procession of splendid sentences entered his capacious brow and went marching through his brain in order. It seemed likely that this process might continue for an hour or more, until the entire regiment had shifted its quarters, had not the door opened, and the young man, who was inclined to be stout, come in with large naked feet.

      “Oh, Hirst, what I forgot to say was—”

      “Two minutes,” said Hirst, raising his finger.

      He safely stowed away the last words of the paragraph.

      “What was it you forgot to say?” he asked.

      “D’you think you do make enough allowance for feelings?” asked Mr. Hewet. He had again forgotten what he had meant to say.

      After intense contemplation of the immaculate Gibbon Mr. Hirst smiled at the question of his friend. He laid aside his book and considered.

      “I should call yours a singularly untidy mind,” he observed. “Feelings? Aren’t they just what we do allow for? We put love up there, and all the rest somewhere down below.” With his left hand he indicated the top of a pyramid, and with his right the base.

      “But you didn’t get out of bed to tell me that,” he added severely.

      “I got out of bed,” said Hewet vaguely, “merely to talk I suppose.”

      “Meanwhile I shall undress,” said Hirst. When naked of all but his shirt, and bent over the basin, Mr. Hirst no longer impressed one with the majesty of his intellect, but with the pathos of his young yet ugly body, for he stooped, and he was so thin that there were dark lines between the different bones of his neck and shoulders.

      “Women interest me,” said Hewet, who, sitting on the bed with his chin resting on his knees, paid no attention to the undressing of Mr. Hirst.

      “They’re so stupid,” said Hirst. “You’re sitting on my pyjamas.”

      “I suppose they are stupid?” Hewet wondered.

      “There can’t be two opinions about that, I imagine,” said Hirst, hopping briskly across the room, “unless you’re in love—that fat woman Warrington?” he enquired.

      “Not one fat woman—all fat women,” Hewet sighed.

      “The women I saw to-night were not fat,” said Hirst, who was taking advantage of Hewet’s company to cut his toe-nails.

      “Describe them,” said Hewet.

      “You know I can’t describe things!” said Hirst. “They were much like other women, I should think. They always are.”

      “No; that’s where we differ,” said Hewet. “I say everything’s different. No two people are in the least the same. Take you and me now.”

      “So I used to think once,” said Hirst. “But now they’re all types. Don’t take us,—take this hotel. You could draw circles round the whole lot of them, and they’d never stray outside.”

      (”You can kill a hen by doing that”), Hewet murmured.

      “Mr. Hughling Elliot, Mrs. Hughling Elliot, Miss Allan, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury—one circle,” Hirst continued. “Miss Warrington, Mr. Arthur Venning, Mr. Perrott, Evelyn M. another circle; then there are a whole lot of natives; finally ourselves.”

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