Friendly Young Ladies Read Online Free PDF

which laid down that if a person who had been crying, however obviously, decided to ignore the fact, those who might have to converse with her did so too. It was awful while it lasted, but somehow one got through.
    “Good afternoon, Dr. Bracknell,” she said, indistinctly, but with as social a manner as she could manage. “I’m so sorry Mother isn’t at home.” With sudden inspiration she added, “My cold seems to have got more runny again today.”
    Peter walked over, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Mechanically she slid out a hot, moist hand to have her pulse taken. He took it between both of his, and squeezed it lightly, “That’s too bad, isn’t it?” he said softly; and directed a charming smile, full of the tenderest understanding, straight into her eyes.
    Elsie’s response had a beautiful inevitability, like the ring of colour that forms in a test-tube when the right reagent is dropped in. Her breath caught twice in her throat, and finished up in a violent sob. She turned over quickly on the pillow, so that Peter, who still had hold of her hand, found one of his own clasped somewhere under her collar-bone. Her shoulders shook with her efforts not to make an unbecoming noise. Peter bent over her and smoothed her hair, tangled into a mat from being lain on, with his free hand.
    “I always knew,” he said, “that some day or other you’d tell me all about it. I never hurry these things. They happen, in their own time.”
    Elsie’s sobbing ceased, and she lay still. There was a moment of silence; a perfect moment, mutually ideal, like that which exists between a good violinist and a very good audience, in the virtuoso passage of a sonata. Neither Peter nor Elsie, for different reasons, was precisely aware of its nature. A kind of after-vibration, more moving than the words themselves, seemed to hang in the air.
    “You don’t have to tell me, you know, if you’d rather not,” said Peter, with hair-trigger timing.
    “I guessed you knew. Everyone who comes knows sooner or later. As a rule that’s the worst thing. But I don’t mind you. I thought I would. But in a sort of way it’s a relief.”
    “I was hoping you’d feel that.”
    Elsie gave a damp smile. She took it for granted that no further explanations were needed. This might have created an impasse; but not for Peter, who took such assumptions about himself for granted, and hardly expected to start from anything less. He pitched his voice a tone lower. Warm, intimate, and disturbingly different from the most affectionate sounds made by her mother or her best friend at school, it sent a little shiver down Elsie’s spine.
    “Tell me about it just the same. I’d like it, and it will do you good. I want very much to help, you know.”
    So, indeed, he did. His sincerity was evident to both of them, and a source of equal pleasure to each.
    “There isn’t really much to tell. It’s just pretty terrible. I wonder if it often happens. One’s people not getting on, I mean.”
    “You poor dear.” Peter himself was scarcely aware of having received information; he shared immediately Elsie’s conviction that he had known all along. “Yes, I’m afraid it does happen pretty often, society being the daft thing it is. Only some people notice more and feel more, and you happen to be one of them. Try not to be unhappy about it. It’s better, you know, in spite of everything, to notice and feel.”
    This was a point of view which had never occurred to Elsie. It shed over everything a magic and transforming light. Like a cat’s first taste of fish, an actor’s first publicity, a boy’s first long trousers, is the first chance to be interesting that comes in the way of a girl in her ’teens. Peter saw the faint, astonished dawn of self-esteem in her dejected face, and was overjoyed. It was one of his most endearing traits never to elevate himself by lowering other people. He was a sociable creature, and liked company in the empyrean. Naturally