Encounters: stories Read Online Free PDF

suddenly alert and interested, as though she were watching through the lens of a microscope some tortured insect twirling on a pin.
    Mrs. Tottenham sat down stiffly on the sofa, and laid the photo on her lap. Suddenly she clasped her hands and put them up before her eyes.
    "I couldn't,"she gasped."Not after all these years I couldn't. Not like this. O Lord, I've got so ugly! I can't pretend—I haven't got the heart to risk it. It's been so real to me, I couldn't bear to lose him.
    "It's all gone, it's all gone. I've been pretendmg. I used to be a fine figure of a woman. How can I have the heart to care when I couldn't keep him caring?"

    "You broke it off. It was all over and done with, you told me so. It was wrong, besides. Why should either of you want to rake it up when it was all past and done with seventeen years ago?"
    "Because it was wrong. It's this awful rightness that's killing me. My husband's been a bad man, too, but here we both are, smirking and grinning at each other, just to keep hold of something we neither of us want.''
    Lydia was terrified by the dry, swift sobbing. She felt suddenly hard and priggish and immature. All her stresses, her fears and passions, were such twilight things.
    Mrs. Tottenham stood upright and held the photograph in the flame of the gas jet, watching the ends curl upwards. For all her frizzled hair and jingling ornaments and smudgy tentative cosmetics she was suddenly elemental and heroic.
    It was over.
    Lydia went quietly out of the room and shut the door behind her.
    The place was vibrant with the humanity of Mrs. Tottenham. It was as though a child had been born in the house.

THE CONFIDANTE
    YOU are losing your imagination,"cried Maurice. It was a bitter reproach. He stood over her, rumpHng up his hair, and the wiry-tufts sprung upright, quivering from his scalp.
    Penelope gulped, then sat for a moment in a silence full of the consciousness of her brutality. She had never dreamed that her secret preoccupation would be so perceptible to Maurice. Unconsciously she had been drawing her imaginations in upon herself like the petals of a flower, and her emotions buzzed and throbbed within them like a pent-up bee.
    The room was dark with rain, and they heard the drip and rustle of leaves in the drinking garden Through the open window the warm, wet air blew in on them, and a shimmer of rain was visible against the trees beyond.
    "I never meant"began Penelope.
    "I beg your pardon,"said Maurice stiffly.

    "I suppose I am becoming quite insufferable. I have been making perfectly unjustifiable demands on your sympathy and patience and—imagination. I am an egotistical brute, I daresay. Of course there is
    not the slightest reason why you"His
    indulgence intimated that there was, on the contrary, every reason why she should.... "I felt a bit jarred just now,"he excused himself, with simple pathos.
    "I never meant, a bit"resumed
    Penelope.
    "I know, I know,"said Maurice, all magnanimity. The sickly sweetness of this reconciliation overpowered her.
    "What a pair of fools we are!"she cried hysterically."Maurice, dear, we're wearing this thing thin. I'm afraid I've been doing gallery to you and Veronica for the last six months, and you've both played up to me magnificently. But"
    "Veronica"protested Maurice.
    "Oh, yes, Veronica comes here too. She comes and sits for hours over there, just where you are now. There's not an aspect of your emotional relationship that we've not

    discussed. Veronica's coming here this afternoon,"she said abruptly."She's a chilly person. I'd better light the fire."
    "God!"said Maurice.
    Penelope was on her knees before the fireplace, her head almost inside the grate. Her voice came hollowly from the dark recess.
    "I thought you'd be surprised,"she said. ("Damn, it will not light!")
    "Surprised!"said Maurice."Penelope,"—his tone had the deadly reasonableness of a driven man's—"I think you hardly realise what you're doing. I know
    you meant well, my good girl, but