The Slaves of Solitude Read Online Free PDF

tried too hard in company and
conversation, and so sometimes gave an air, untrue to her character, of being genteel.
    Oddly enough, though ‘hopeless’, she had only recently had an offer of marriage – this from an elderly accountant in the publisher’s firm in which she worked – a
mean, impossible man who had somehow perceived her possibilities. As she sensitively and kindly rejected him in the taxi that night, with ‘No – it’s impossible – I’m
very sorry, but I’m afraid it’s
impossible
!’, her liquid, loving eyes, looking shyly out of the taxi window, were probably less those of one sympathising with the man she
was rejecting (though they were this, too) than of one contemplating, with pensive resigned sadness, the joy which would have been hers had she now been receiving, or had ever in her life received,
an offer which she could reasonably accept.
    She had a slim, straight figure, but she was slightly flat-chested. She was the daughter of a dentist. She had two brothers, one of whom, the youngest of the family, had recently been killed in
the air. The other, older than she and from whom she heard about once every two years, was in Brazil. Both her parents were dead. She had matriculated, and had at one time been a schoolmistress in
a boys’ preparatory school at Hove.
    When she had been bombed out of her room in Kensington, escaping with her life (for she was in the West End at the time) but with only a few of her small possessions, she had come down to Thames
Lockdon and the Rosamund Tea Rooms at the invitation of her aunt, who had let her sleep in her room. Since then her aunt had moved on to Guildford to friends, and she had been given this room of
her own at the top.
    Thames Lockdon had been ‘heaven’, then, with its dark, still nights, over which the sirens occasionally came yelling triumphantly forth, only to be gradually snubbed by the profound
silence of the firmament, undisturbed even by the distant sound of guns and bombs, which followed. And she had been made a fuss of, then, a sort of heroine indeed, and given a fortnight’s
holiday. And the town was ‘pretty’, and the food ‘very good’, and the people ‘very nice’ – even Mr. Thwaites had seemed ‘very nice’.
    But now, after more than a year of it, Mr. Thwaites was president in hell.
    She would have gone back to London if she had known where to go, or if she had not still feared guns and bombs at night, or if she could have summoned up enough initiative at any given
moment.
    When she had washed she heard the tinny Oriental gong being hit pettishly by Mrs. Payne. Before going down to dinner, however, she paused in her room, listening at her door for Mr.
Thwaites’ voice as he came out of the Lounge on his way down to the dining-room on the ground floor. Although she had to have dinner at the same table with him, her feelings towards Mr.
Thwaites were of such a nature that she desired to put off the evil moment, to spare herself even the risk of an encounter with him outside the Lounge door, and the consequent necessity of walking
down the stairs with him to eat. This morbid conduct she called to herself ‘letting him get down first’.
    3
    About the dining-room there was something peculiarly and gratuitously hellish. For this quite small room, with its bow-window jutting out on to the street, had once been
the famous Tea Room itself! – the room into which, long ago, the seeker after tea in the street had hastily glimpsed, or perhaps rudely stared, rapidly absorbing through his pores the quality
of the cakes, the class and quantity of the customers, the size of the room, the cleanliness of the cloths, and the comfort of the chairs, before making his decision to enter or go elsewhere! . . .
And since those days hardly anything had been changed: all that had happened, practically, was that all the Tea Room now belonged to all the boarders at all the meal-times. (Mrs. Payne spoke with
complacency of