I, too, looked out of the window; a light frost had crisped the leaves, and though there was no sun the landscape was so full of gold that it glowed and vibrated with apparent sunshine. The fields were full of workers, women in coloured linen overalls guiding ploughs, and allotment-workers on their patches, and the little cottage gardens were gay with autumn flowers; and I wondered if there were undercurrents in all these apparently simple lives, if the men and women out there in the brilliant golden world had furtive motives and social masks like mother and I.
It is never safe to wonder for more than three seconds whether everything is what it seems unless you are over fifty—when you are under fifty it hurts, but when you are over fifty you know that you can never alter other people, only yourself, and you know that your disillusionment is half your own fault.
I felt a sort of strangling bitterness. I was very grateful for it, because I knew that out of it you can grow a sort of hothouse don't-care-ness that makes it possible for you to do horrid things and not feel horrid until long after they are done.
I caught a train to Cromer Court almost at once.
Mother saw me off.
She stood at the window and chatted charmingly. I am sure that all the people in the carriage were enchanted with her personality. Mother is so fastidiously, almost contemptuously refined and cultured. Had she lived in the time of the French Revolution she would have been gloatingly guillotined by the revolutionists for the very way she breathes.
"And you won't forget?" she said lightly.
"I won't forget," I answered.
One of the most disappointing things in life is that you never go back to a place—even if you have only been away twenty-four hours—feeling exactly the same as when you left it. You can recover your old poise, but the going away has altered you, you make a dozen little mental readjustments on your return—you see things with the aid of the new experience you have gained during your absence. Life is one continual process of readjustment with people, places, and things, and ourselves.
We marvel at the chameleon—his feats are nothing to the feats of a perfectly normal human.