“Yes, imagine! She hasn’t read it!”
“I’ve read The Vicar of Wakefield,” I said. And then I was annoyed that I had shown I was annoyed. But at once Miss Howe helped me. Miss Howe was always nice to me.
“How far have you got? Where the man tires of her? Ah, yes! Well, after that it’s just her struggle. She—she earns her living—in the inevitable way. She grows into a miser. She hoards.”
Mr. Flood looked acute.
“That’s what upset them. They don’t mind a Magdalen; but Magdalen unaware, unrepentant, Magdalen preserving her ill-gotten gains—no, that’s not quite nice.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe. “If anyone can’t feel the spirit it’s written in, the passion of pity—I think it’s the most pitiful thing I’ve ever read. It made me shiver. That wretched creature, saving and sparing——” And then to me, for I suppose I showed I was interested—“She wants to get away, you know, to get back into the country. It’s her dream. The homesickness——”
“I suppose such a woman could——?” said the Baxter girl.
“I used to argue it with Madala. Madala always said that, with some people, that animal craving for some special place was like love—a passion that could waste you. She said that every woman must have some devouring passion, for a man, or a child, or a place—every woman. And that for a beaten creature like that, it would be place—the homing instinct of a cat or a bird. And mixed up with it, religion—the vague shadowy ideal of peace and cleanly beauty—all that the wretched creature tries to express in her phrase—‘getting out and living quiet’—that Madala typifies in the word ‘Eden.’ It meant much to Madala. Don’t you remember that passage towards the end of the book where she meets the man, the first man, and brings him home with her—and he doesn’t even recognize her, and she doesn’t even care.” She picked up a bundle of tattered proofs and turned them over. “Where is it? What an appalling hand she had!” She stood a moment, reading a page and pursing her lips. “Oh, well, what’s the use of reading it? We all know it.” She flung it down.
“Let me see,” I said to the Baxter girl. She drew it towards me. It was the first proof I’d ever seen. It was corrected till it was difficult to read. But I made it out at last.
With the closing of the door she dismissed him with one phrase for ever from her mind—