A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

Rosemary laughed. "Miss Percival will do the suspicion. But it isn't a matter of finding out—it's merely seeing."

They were silent for a few minutes. Their minds were full of something else, of the delightful topic that they had been discussing—Anthony's career and Rosemary's future. Presently Laura leaned forward. "Rosemary," she said, "are you simply happy and nothing more, or do you find it all rather queer as well?"

Her shy tone made Rosemary feel a little shy. "How do you mean, queer?" she asked, avoiding Laura's eyes. Laura hesitated. "I think it's the way being in love makes you look at things that is so odd—as if nothing mattered but yourself and one other person and a bundle of feelings—what they feel and what you feel and what they feel about what you feel. It is queer—it's the right word—to find these extraordinary new emotions running all over your life. There doesn't seem anything for them to have come out of. I don't feel in the least, sometimes, as if they belonged to me—they've just appeared." She hesitated, and then frowned. It was not easy to find words for her meaning. "And yet because of them," she went on, as Rosemary did not speak, "the whole of the rest of the world seems insignificant and far away, and you've become in a sort of way unresponsive, unexpectant to it—it doesn't really matter. Not like the mornings when one used to wake up and think that anything—the most heavenly adventure—might happen that very day! One doesn't even want the adventures—it's like losing a whole lot of tiny delicate feelers, and getting instead of them a sort of anguished sensitiveness to one set of impressions."

She finished on a questioning note, but Rosemary did not look up. This was a discussion that she ought in theory to have welcomed eagerly. Laura was offering her a new outlook, fresh experience—she had always deplored the fact that women find it hard to be open or even candid with one another about their fundamental emotions. And now that this chance had come for a frank conversation with her sister she was embarrassed. She hoped that Laura would say more—she was ready to listen, with all the sympathy that she could command, to anything that Laura wished to say. But she could not join in, she could not apply Laura's wisdom to herself. She did not want to know, from Laura, what she was feeling or what she was going to feel. That belonged to no one but her and Anthony. Even remotely, Laura must not influence it. She had rather run blind and unwarned into the future than lose the privacy and mystery of her thoughts. Laura, after all, was her elder sister, capable of discussing her with their mother. She ignored her question. "You mean," she said, "that you leave off being interested in outside things."

Laura shook her head. "No, not exactly. You don't lose your interest, if it's really the things you were keen about and not the romance and excitement of being keen, but I think perhaps you grow more selfish towards them." She looked thoughtfully into the fire.

"I don't see why!" Rosemary was not of an age to be skilful at understanding other people's half-expressed subtleties.

Laura became conscious of her sister's reluctance. Rosemary must think, she told herself, that she was complaining! "I suppose," she said quickly, "that it's a phase women tend to go through. A phase of being absorbed in subjective emotional things rather than in objective intellectual ones. What made me think of it is that mother, thanks to your idea, may be going to come out of it. We shall be able to see at last what is really mother and what is only the attitude belonging to what she has been taught. The more I think of it the more splendid I think it will be for her."

Rosemary caught at this. "I am so glad! Only, Laura, did you notice what she said just now? I don't believe she's going to let us see anything at all!"

Laura laughed. "That's her darling conscience. It's father's business, and its black secrets are father's secrets. She won't tell us anything, but the point is that she will change. We have only to wait."

This was not enough for Rosemary. She had been hoping to hear exactly and in detail what Mary thought of the tea-shops and their implications. She had been hoping too, to slip into such talks a few incontrovertible general principles. She was not sure that without some such help Mary might not be carried away by her husband's point of view. "I hate waiting," she said, "it's dull. Trent waits."