Christina still wrote a little, but not so much. She and Milly studied and travelled and, in the country, at the proper seasons, rusticated. With all its harmony, their life did not want its more closely knitting times of fear, as when Milly was dangerously ill and Christina nursed her through the long crisis, or when Christina's heart showed alarming symptoms and hurried them away to German specialists.
There were funny little quarrels, too, funny to look back upon, though very painful at the moment; for Milly could be fretful, and Christina violent in reproach. The swift reconciliations atoned for all, when, holding each other's hands, they laughed at each other, each eager to take the blame. Certain defects they came to recognize and to take into account, tolerant, loving comprehension, the ripest stage of affection, seeming achieved. Milly was capricious, had moods of gloom and disconsolateness when nothing seemed to interest her, neither books nor music nor people, not even Christina, and when, sunken in a deep armchair, she would listlessly tap her fingers on the chair-arms, her eyes empty of all but a monotonous melancholy. These moods always hurt Christina,--Milly herself seemed hardly aware of them, certainly was not aware of their hurting,--and she hid the hurt in a gentle sympathy that averted tactful eyes from her friend's retirement. But she did not quite understand; for she never wished to retire into herself and away from Milly.
And Milly discovered that Christina could be unreasonable--so she tolerantly termed a smouldering element in her friend's nature; Christina, in fact, could be fiercely jealous. They shared all their friends, many of them dear friends, but dear on a certain level, below the illuminated solitude where they two stood in their precious isolation. And Milly protested to herself that she was the last person to wish that isolation disturbed. No one knew her, understood her, helped and loved her as Christina did; there was no one like Christina, no one so strong, so generous, so large-natured. Why then should Christina, like a foolish school-girl, show unmistakably--her efforts to hide it only making her look dim-eyed, white-lipped--a sombre misery if Milly allowed anyone to absorb her? This really piteous infirmity was latent in Christina; she did not show it at all during the first years of their companionship; it grew with her growing devotion to Milly. Milly discovered it when she asked little Joan Ashby to go to Italy with them. Christina, at the proposal, had been all glad, frank acquiescence. Unsuspectingly Milly petted and made much of the girl whose adoration was sweet to her. She went about with her sight-seeing, when Christina said that she was tired and did not care to see things, not remembering that when they were alone together Christina had never seemed tired. She laughed and talked till all hours of the night with Joan, when Christina had gone to bed saying that she was sleepy. All had seemed peaceful and normal. Milly was stupefied when, by degrees, a consciousness of a difference in Christina crept upon her.