“Now don’t tell me it’s illogical to throw away only the coat and not undress myself completely. I know quite well that everything I’ve got on is yours.”
“Oh no, it’s not,” Philip said, gently. “It’s yours.”
“But you paid for everything.”
“No, you paid yourself,” he insisted.
“How?”
“By being Sylvia. Come along, don’t trample on your poor coat. There’s a most detestable wind blowing.”
He picked up the offending overcoat and helped her into it again with so much sympathy half humorous, half grave in his demeanor that she could not help being sorry for her outburst.
Nevertheless, the fact of her complete dependence upon Philip for everything, even before marriage, was always an oppression to Sylvia’s mind, which was increased by the continual reminders of her loneliness that intercourse with other girls forced upon her. They, when they should marry, should be married from a background; the lovers, when they came for them, would have to fight for their love by breaking down the barriers of old associations, old friendships, and old affections; in a word, they would have to win the brides. What was her own background? Nothing but a panorama of streets which offered no opposition to Philip’s choice except in so far as it was an ugly background for a possession of his own and therefore fit to be destroyed. It was all very well for Philip to tell her that she was herself and that he loved her accordingly. If that were true, why was he taking so much trouble to turn her into something different? Other girls at Hornton House, when they married, would not begin with ugly backgrounds to be obliterated; their pasts would merge beautifully with the pasts of their husbands; they were not being transformed by Miss Pinck and Miss Primer; they were merely being supplied by them with value for their parents’ money. It was a visit to Phyllis Markham’s home in Leicestershire during the Easter holidays that had branded with the iron of jealousy these facts upon her meditation. Phyllis used to lament that she had no brothers; and Sylvia used to wonder what she would have said if she had been like herself, without mother, without father, without brothers, without sisters, without relations, without friends, without letters, without photographs, with nothing in the whole world between herself and the shifting panorama from which she had been snatched but the love of a timid man inspired by an unusual encounter in Brompton Cemetery. This visit to Phyllis Markham was the doom upon their friendship; however sweet, however sympathetic, however loyal Phyllis might be, she must ultimately despise her friend’s past; every word Sylvia listened to during those Easter holidays seemed to cry out the certain fulfilment of this conjecture.
“I expect I’m too sensitive,” Sylvia said to herself. “I expect I really am common, because apparently common people are always looking out for slights. I don’t look out for them now, but if I were to tell Phyllis all about myself, I’m sure I should begin to look out for them. No, I’ll just be friends with her up to a point, for so long as I stay at Hornton House; then we’ll separate forever. I’m really an absolute fraud. I’m just as much of a fraud now as when I was dressed up as a boy. I’m not real in this life. I haven’t been real since I came down to breakfast with Miss Ashley that first morning. I’m simply a very good impostor. I must inherit the talent from father. Another reason against telling Phyllis about myself is that, if I do, I shall become her property. Miss Ashley knows all about me, but I’m not her property, because it’s part of her profession to be told secrets. Phyllis would love me more than ever, so long as she was the only person that owned the secret, but if anybody else ever knew, even if it were only Philip, she would be jealous and she would have to make a secret of it with some one else. Then she would be ashamed of herself and would begin to hate and despise me in self-defense. No, I must never tell any of the girls.”
Apart from these morbid fits, which were not very frequent, Sylvia enjoyed her stay at Markham Grange. In a way it encouraged the idea of marrying Philip; for the country life appealed to her not as to a cockney by the strangeness of its inhabitants and the mere quantity of grass in sight, but more deeply with those old ineffable longings of Hampstead.