“Quite. I nearly died with the effort of getting them to fasten.”
Then outside there was a familiar muffled step, and a knock. In the mirror Teresa saw a look of annoyance pass over Concha’s face.
In came the Doña, in a white dressing-gown, her face illuminated by the flame of her candle, and looking not unlike one of Zurburán’s Carthusian monks.
“Well darling,” answered Concha, with exaggerated nonchalance, adding to Teresa, “_won’t_ they undo?”
The Doña put down her candle, and seated herself heavily on the bed.
“Oh, damn them! Won’t they undo? Haven’t you any scissors?”
“That young Dundas seemed to enjoy himself,” said the Doña.
Then the hooks yielded at last to the leverage of the nail-scissors, and Concha kissed the Doña and Teresa and went back to her own room.
“Do you think he is attracted by Concha?”
“I really don’t know ... do you want him to be?”
“Do I want him to be? What has that to do with it? I want to know if he _is_.”
“Marry her! Englishmen never think of marriage ... they just what you call ‘rag round’; they can’t even fall in love.”
Teresa scrutinised her for a few seconds, and then she said: “I believe you are furious with every man who doesn’t fall in love with one of your daughters;” and she suddenly remembered a remark of Concha’s made in a moment of intense irritation: “The Doña ought to keep a brothel—then she would be really happy.”
That year winter was so mild as to be almost indistinguishable from spring. Imperceptibly, the sparse patches of snow, the hyacinthine patches of blue light lying in hollows of the hills, in wrinkles of the land, turned into small waxen leafless flowers, watching, waiting, in the grass.
By the beginning of February the song of the birds had begun; a symbol that to most hearts is almost Chinese, the symbol and its idea being so indistinguishable that it seems that it is Hope herself who is perched out there on the top of the trees, singing.
One day one would suddenly realise that the mirabelle and purple prunus were actually out; but blossom is such a chilly thing, and it arrives so quietly, that it seemed to make no difference in that leafless world.
Then would come a day when the air was exquisitely soft and the sky very blue; and between the sky and earth there would seem to be a silent breathless conspiracy. Not a bud, only silence; but one knew that something would soon happen. But the next morning, there would be an east wind—skinning the bloom off the view, turning the sky to lead, and making the mirabelle and prunus look, in their leaflessness, so bleak that they might have been the flower (in its sense of _essence, embodiment of_), of the stern iron qualities of January. The singing of the birds, too, became a cold, cold sound, as if the east wind was, like the ether, a medium through which we hear as well as see. But such days were rare.