Mrs. Simms made the coffee that morning. It was not so good as
when I made it; I noticed the difference, but Walter did not.
I was sorry he did not; I wondered if he had only said he liked
mine best, to please me, if he had really never noticed it different
at all.
I felt very ill, those next months, and although I was so happy,
I cried quite often at silly things. It was very odd to me to
feel like this, for I had never been ill in my life except when
I was seven and had measles. Ordinarily I felt so well and full
of life. I did not expect to be tired at the end of the day;
now I felt very tired, and as though the life had gone out of
me.
Maud said:
‘You must not let Helen become invalidish, Walter. She ought
to realize that having a child is not an illness at all.’
Walter said:
‘That depends, I suppose, on whether she feels ill.’
Maud said:
‘Not in the least; that is merely subjective; a great many women
give way in these things, especially women of Helen’s type. It
is most important that she should lead a normal and active life.’
Walter said:
‘My dear Maud, you know nothing about it.’
I was not there, but he told me about it afterwards, and I loved
him for being rude to Maud.
She seemed to come and visit us very often, but I suppose it
was not very often really.
Mrs. Sebright came every Wednesday to dinner, and every Sunday
we went to lunch with Grandmother in Campden Hill Square.
Hugo had gone abroad, he had gone as private secretary or attaché
on a Royal Commission in India, and would be away nearly a year.
He had gone already before we came back to London, and I had
not seen him since the wedding.
It surprised me rather to find how little I missed him; he seemed
to belong to another life, a different kind of existence that
was quite past now. That had been playing at life; I was living
now. Yet sometimes I thought:
‘I should like to tell Hugo about it. I should like to tell him
how wonderful this is.’
He would understand, I was sure of that.
Guy came to dinner with us once or twice, but it was not a success.
He and Walter did not get on at all, and somehow each showed
his worst side to the other; I was sorry about it.
‘We had better leave it alone for the present,’ I thought, ‘later
on they will fit in better.’
The Addingtons came oftener to see us. George and Mollie could,
I think, get on with anybody. Walter could not dislike them and
they quite liked him. I was glad to see them always, but it was
different even with them; they seemed much further off than they
used to be, like pleasant strangers, outside one’s life, instead
of inside. I did not want to talk to Mollie intimately as we
used to talk. ‘She is not married,’ I thought. ‘She is not going
to have a child. I cannot talk to her about the vital things’;
and outside things seemed unimportant to me at this time.
Sophia Lane Watson came to lunch. She talked to Walter about
Babylon, and he said she was ‘an intelligent girl,’ and liked
her. I wondered how she knew about Babylon; she seemed to know
a good deal, but one never did know with Sophia what she knew,
and what she didn’t; it was all in streaks.
I wondered if she missed Hugo, and why he had gone away. You
could not tell anything from her; she looked just the same as
always, white, and non-committal, and self-possessed; at least
not exactly self-possessed; you could never be sure with Sophia
whether she was hiding her feelings or just not there in her
mind at all; sometimes it seemed like that, as though she was
mentally and emotionally a long way off, and only her lips speaking
to you.
I felt her more interesting now. I did not feel hostile to her,
as I had when Hugo was there. I did not think now, somehow, that
he would marry her.
Her play was finished now. It was going to be acted. The Drama
Society were going to do it. She did not seem excited about it
at all. She did not want to talk about it.