Chapters (30)
‘ – I don’t suppose I should understand, should I? Funny how well we know each other – I’ve never given myself away like this before – and yet how little we know. In an ordinary way, in London, we should run miles, I dare say, rather than meet. Of course, I should have met Victor anywhere. I say, I hope I haven’t made your bed uncomfy, rolling about. I really can’t sit on foreign armchairs: they’re so steep.’ She picked her hat up from the floor, brushed the dust off it tenderly and put it on. ‘As you say, this is not such a bad hat.’ She heaved a deep sigh. ‘I feel ever so much happier; you are wonderful. Have you got a shoe-horn? These shoes are so tight, really that’s why I dislike them. I say, will you come to tea with me and Victor at the Pâtisserie and look at him again? He’s sensitive really; if you were nice to him he’d buck up tremendously – you’d be surprised. We eat a tremendous amount of pâtisserie; we adore it, and it doesn’t seem worth while beginning to economize until there is some remote prospect of our getting married. And if we don’t get married – I mean, to each other – there will always be this to look back on. That’s what we feel.’
Sighing and talking, vaguely she drifted towards the door. There she turned back and brilliantly nodded.
A suspicion that this mood of lucidity had, after all, been induced by an over-indulgence in pastry cast a slight shadow on Sydney’s farewell. ‘I should be careful,’ said she, ‘or you’ll both get most fearfully spotty. Look at those little Italians! Can’t you try some other narcotic?’
‘You should be thankful we don’t drink,’ said Veronica, and shut the door after her – not satisfactorily, for it clicked open again and began to creak on its hinges in the manner of hotel doors all over the world.
Sydney heard her quickening footsteps retreat; she listened forlornly, straining her ears for the last of them. Then she got up and tidied the bed; smoothed out the eiderdown, picked up the amber beads and hanging them round her neck stood telling them off like a rosary. Some premonition, such as that with which a recurring physical pain announces itself, made her snatch up Jude the Obscure quickly and stare at the pages, but there she found nothing but print. She looked up for a moment and – ‘She has so absolutely given you the go-by,’ the room repeated, catching her unawares. The shapes of the furniture, everything that she looked at, said it again.