Anne had not once moved from her original place by the table in the course
of that long conversation of ours, and she still stood there, her
finger-tips resting on the oak with a powerful effect of poise when Brenda
came into the room.
Brenda's actions were far more vivacious than her friend's. She came in
with an air of youthful exuberance, looked at me with a shade of inquiry,
and then sat down opposite Anne.
"I came back over the hill and through the wood," she said, resting her
elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. "It's a topping evening.
Poor Arthur; I wish I could have gone with him. I offered to, but he
didn't want me to come. I'm not sure he didn't think they might kidnap me
if I went too near." She turned to me with a bright smile as she added,
"Could they keep me, Mr. Melhuish; shut me up or something?"
"I'm not quite sure about that," I said, "but they could
arrest--Arthur"--(I could not call him anything else, I found)--"if he ran
away with you. On a charge of abduction, you know."
"They could make it pretty nasty for us all round, in fact," Brenda
concluded.
"I'm afraid they could," I agreed.
She was looking extraordinarily pretty. The bizarre contrast between her
dark eyelashes and her fair hair seemed to find some kind of echo in the
combination of health and fragility that she expressed in her movements.
She appeared at once vital and delicate without being too highly-strung. I
could well understand how the bucolic strain in Arthur Banks was prostrate
with admiration before such a rare and exciting beauty.
By the side of Brenda, Anne looked physically robust. The developed lines
of her figure emphasised Brenda's fragility. And yet Anne's eyes, her
whole pose, expressed a spirituality that Brenda lacked. Anne, with her
amazing changes of mood, her rapid response to emotion, gave expression to
some spirit not less feminine than Brenda's, but infinitely deeper. Behind
the moving shadows and sunlight of her impulses there lay always some
reminder of a constant orientation. She might trifle brilliantly with the
surface of life, but her soul was more steadfast than a star. Brenda might
love passionately, but her love would be relatively personal, selfish.
When Anne gave herself, she would love like a mother, with her whole
being.