“Do you know where the shoe pinches?” asked Arnold. “It’s that you are six years younger than she is; if it were less or more it would be all right—but _six_ years is jolly hard to forgive. You see, Teresa is still nominally a girl. By Jove!” and he gave a short, scornful laugh, “there she is, probably telling herself that you get on her nerves because you’re frivolous, and like rag-time, and all the rest of it, while all the time she, the immaculate, is just suffering from suppressed sex, like any other spinster.”
This explanation definitely jarred on Concha: she, too, suspected Teresa of being jealous of her, but deep down she hoped that this jealousy was based on something less fortuitous and more flattering to herself than six years’ juniority; nor did she like being thought of as a mere frivolous “fox-trotter.” She had the tremendous pride of generation of the post-War adolescent; she and her friends she felt as a brilliant, insolent triumphant sodality, free, wise, invincible, who, having tasted of the fruit of the seven symbolic trees of Paradise, and having found their flavour insipid, had chosen, with their bold, rather weary eyes wide open, to expend their magnificent talents on fox-trots, _revues_, and dalliance, to turn life and its treacherous possibilities into a Platonic _kermis_—oh, it was maddening of Teresa not to see this, to persist in thinking of them as frivolous, commonplace, rather vulgar young mediocrities! She should just hear some of the midnight talks between Concha and her friend, Elfrida Penn ... the passion, the satire, the profundity!
As a matter of fact, these talks were mainly of young men, chiffons, the doings of their other schoolfellows, what their head mistress had said to them on such and such an occasion at school, with an occasional interjection of, “Oh, it’s all _beastly_!” or a wondering whether twenty years hence they would be very dull and stout, and whether they would still be friends.
But midnight talks are apt to acquire in retrospect a great profundity and significance.
Also, the crudeness of Arnold’s words—“suppressed sex, like any other spinster”—shocked her in spite of herself. Her old, child’s veneration for Teresa lived on side by side with her new conviction that she was _passée_, out-of-date, pre-War, and it made her wince that she should be explained by nasty, Freudian theories.