But without knowing it, Anita helped me. Her voice, rising excitedly in answer to some word of Mr. Flood’s, recalled the Baxter girl.
“Mystery? Of course there’s a mystery! She was at the height of her promise in Ploughed Fields. It’s as good as Eden Walls in matter and, technically, better still. The third book ought to have settled her place in modern literature for good and all. It ought to have been her master-piece. But what does she do? We expect a chaplet of pearls, and she gives us a daisy-chain. Isn’t that a mystery worth solving? Won’t people read the Life for that if for nothing else? Am I the only person who has asked what happened to her between her second and her third books?”
“I tell you, but you won’t listen,” Mr. Flood insisted. “Your romantic has become a realist and is flying from it to the resting-place of romance.”
“I do listen. Just so. You use your words and I use mine, but we mean the same thing. She’s been bruising herself against facts. She has been walled up by facts. Her vision is gone. Now what was, in her case, the all-obscuring fact?”
“She was a woman,” said the blonde lady. “It could only be one thing. Don’t I know the signs? She even lost her sense of humour.”
“Yes, she did, didn’t she?” cried the Baxter girl in a voice of relief. “Oh, I remember one day, just before the engagement was announced——”
“As if that had anything to do with it,” said Anita scornfully.
“—and she’d been so absent-minded I couldn’t get anything out of her. I thought I knew her well enough to tease her. I had told her all my affairs. So—‘I believe you’re in love,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll get over it. It’s a phase.’ Was there any harm in that? It was only repeating what you had said to me about her, you know,” she reminded the blonde lady. “But she froze instantly. She made no comment. She just changed the subject. But I felt as if I had been introduced to a new Madala. I wished I hadn’t said it.”
“You are a little fool, Beryl,” said the blonde lady tolerantly.
“But she was altered,” insisted the Baxter girl. “The old Madala would have laughed.”