Friendly Young Ladies Read Online Free PDF Page A

associate logical thinking with coldness and disillusion, sentimentality with kindness and faith. Having no trust in one another’s fundamentals, it was hardly surprising that they felt no eagerness to concede in little things, such as the arrangement of rooms, or meals, or social engagements; their disagreements in these matters, like fragments of a cracked mirror, reflected in miniature their central dissatisfaction, but were too trivial and too hopeless to bring them back to it. Even Leonora had not shocked them into self-questioning: it had been too late. Each had seen in her an extension and condemnation of the other. Thus it was that they no longer had quarrels; only rows.
    Each had effected a kind of semi-adjustment to this routine. Mrs. Lane’s natural optimism was such that always, at the back of her mind, floated a cloudlike expectation of sudden, revolutionary good fortune or escape. Like Elsie, she daydreamed constantly, not of romantic encounters, but that some stranger to whom she had once done a kindness died and left her a comfortable income, or that she made the acquaintance of a charming family, well-to-do but not so smart as to be awkward, who invited her and Elsie for long country house visits, or on a world cruise. It was rarely that one or another of these visions was not present to tinge the background of her thoughts, and to give to the discomfort and unhappiness of her married life an illusion of transience. Thanks to their friendly company, she recovered from the family scenes in about half the time taken by Elsie after merely witnessing them, and rather more quickly than her husband, whose procedure was to exhaust their emotional possibilities and then bury himself in his work. After twenty-seven years of married life she looked, though they were much of an age, at least ten years the younger.
    But now and again there came moments when, though she never really ceased to believe that something would turn up, she felt a kind of panic at the thought of having to wait for it. This was one of the moments. Only one consolation was in reach, to go upstairs and talk things over with Elsie. Dear little Elsie; one had been so careful, all this time she had been ill, to keep everything from her, though perhaps, being so sympathetic, she had guessed sometimes. …But Dr. Bracknell had been so cheerful about her on his last visit, and seemed such a clever, experienced young man. Just a little chat, and then out to the village to blow the cobwebs away. …
    Within half a minute of slamming the dining-room door behind her, she was on her way upstairs. Within half an hour, she was walking up the lane towards the village, her face lightly powdered over, feeling better already. It was Gladys’s half-day, but the grocer’s man had been, and if anyone else called, Arthur would have for once to answer the bell.
    Within twenty minutes more, after Mr. Lane, who did not concern himself with Gladys’s free time, had driven off to visit a client, Peter Bracknell parked Dr. Sloane’s coupé in the lane, and rapped smartly on the door.
    When nothing happened, he assumed that everyone in the house was down with influenza, having already paid two visits that day where this had turned out to be the case. So, finding the door unlocked, he walked inside, not unduly anxious over the possibility that he might be mistaken, for, as he would have told anyone who was interested, convention never bothered him much. Having hung up his overcoat in the hall, he went upstairs, tapped perfunctorily at his patient’s door, said “Hullo. Can I come in?” and did so without waiting for an answer.
    Elsie lifted a hot, blurred face from the pillow, and stared at him in horror, through eyes unbeautifully glazed with tears. She had been crying whole-heartedly for the best part of half an hour, and knew that this must be evident beyond any possible remedy. Dimly, however, she took refuge in the etiquette which had obtained at her school, and