3
Everything was new and interesting and altogether delightful to Joan and
Elizabeth during this visit. They played with the zest of truant
schoolboys. No weather, however diabolical, could daunt them; they put
on their mackintoshes and sallied forth in rain, sleet and mud. They got
lost in a fog and found themselves in Kensington instead of Bloomsbury.
They struggled furiously for overcrowded buses, or filled their lungs
with sulphur in the Underground. They stood for hours at the pit doors
of theatres, and walked in the British Museum until their feet ached.
Joan developed a love of pictures, which she found she shared with
Elizabeth, and the mornings that they spent in the galleries were some
of their happiest. To Joan, beauty as portrayed by fine art came as a
heavenly revelation; she knew for the first time the thrill of looking
at someone else's inspired thoughts.
"After all, everything is just thought," she said wisely. "They think,
and then they clothe what they've thought in something; this happens to
be paint and canvas, but it's all the same thing; thought must be
clothed in something so that we can see it."
Elizabeth watched her delightedly. She told herself that it was like
putting a geranium cutting in the window; at first it was just all
green, then came the little coloured buds and then the bloom. She felt
that Joan was growing more in this fortnight than she had done in all
her years at Seabourne; growing, expanding, coming nearer to her
kingdom, day by day.
4
The fortnight passed all too quickly; it was going and then it was gone.
They sat side by side in an empty third-class compartment, rushing back
to Seabourne. Everything had changed suddenly for the worse. Their
clothes struck them as shabby, now that it no longer mattered. In
London, where it really had mattered, they had been quite contented with
their appearance. Their bags, on the luggage rack opposite them, looked
very worn and battered. How had they ever dared to go up to London at
all? They and their possessions belonged so obviously to Seabourne.