“She?” There was the strangest mixture of scorn and admiration in the voice. “As if one could let her know! That was the difficulty with Madala Grey: she wouldn’t take herself seriously. She had—” a pause and a search for the correct word—“what I can only call a _perverted_ sense of humour. If she’d known that I—noted things, she’d have been quite capable of falsifying all her opinions, misrepresenting herself completely, just to—throw me out, as it were. Not maliciously, I don’t mean that. But she teases,” finished Anita petulantly. “She will do it. She laughs at the wrong things. Of course she’s young still.”
“Yes, she’s young—now. She stays young now. She gains that at least,” said the woman in the shadows.
Anita made a quick little sound, half titter and half gasp.
“Oh!” she cried—and her voice was as grey as her face—“I forgot. Do you know—I forgot! It’s going to be ghastly. I believe I shall always be forgetting.”
I glanced up at Kent Rehan. It made me realize that I had been listening with anxiety, that I was afraid of their expressive sentences. They had words, those writing people. They knew what they thought: they could say what they thought: and what they thought could hurt. I didn’t want him to be hurt. I said, under my breath—
“Oh, why do you stay here? They aren’t your sort.”
But he had heard nothing. He was poring over the long tassel of the blind, weaving it into a six-strand plait. I couldn’t help watching his fingers. He had the most beautiful hands that I’ve ever seen on a man. They looked like two alive and independent creatures. They looked as if they could do anything they chose, whether he were there to superintend or not. And he was miles away. I was glad. Anita’s voice was rising like a dreary wind.
“Just that is so strange. All the time I’ve known her I’ve thought of her in the past tense. Her moods, her ways, her actions, were finished things to me—chapters of the _Life_. I _wrote_ her all the time. But now, when she _is_ mine, as it were, now that she exists only in my notes and papers and remembrance of her, now it comes that I’m shaken. I can’t think of her as a subject any more. I shall be wanting her—herself. I can’t think clearly. It’s frightening me, the work there is ahead of me. Because I’ve got to do it without her. She’s lying dead down there in Surrey—now—at this minute. And there’s that man—and a child. One’s overwhelmed. It’s so cruel. The only creature who ever cared for me. Think of Madala, quite still, not answering, not lighting up when you speak to her, staring at the ceiling, staring at her own coffin-lid. In two days she’ll be under the ground. Do you ever think what that means—burial—the corruption—the——”