“How is Sarah?” Alma felt the strain. But for her it was the difficulty of finding common ground for interchange with anyone whose life was lacking in brilliant features. She was behaving, kindly trying for topics; but also, partly, underlining the featurelessness, as a punishment for bad behaviour.
“Oh—flourishing—I think.” She rose, unpinning her stifling veil. She would have to brace herself to reach out to something with which to break into the questions Alma’s kind patience would one by one produce. A catechism leading her thoughts down into a wilderness of unexamined detail that would unfit her for the coming emergence.
“And Harriett?”
“Harriett’s simply splendid. You know, if she only had a little capital she could take another house. She’s sending people away all the time.”
“Oh yes?” Alma did not want to spend time over Harriett’s apartment house, unless it was brightly described. It was too soon for bright descriptions. The item had been dragged in and wasted, out of place. A single distasteful fact. The servants, hidden away beyond the velvet staircase, seemed to be hearing the unsuitable disclosure. She sought about in her mind for something that would hold its own; one of the points of conflict that had cleared, since she was last here, to single unanswerable statements. But Alma forestalled her, attacking the silence with her gayest voice. “Oh Miriam, what do you think. I saw a Speck; yesterday; on the Grand Esplanade. Do you remember the Specks?”
Miriam beamed and agreed, breathing in reminiscences. But they would be endless; and would not satisfy them, or bring them together. She could not, with Alma alone, pretend that those memories were merely amusing. It was a treachery. The mere mention of a name sent her back to the unbearable happiness of that last school summer, a sunlit flower-filled world opening before her, the feeling of being herself a flower, expanding in the sunlight. She could not regard it as a past. All that had happened since was a momentary straying aside, to be forgotten. To that other world she was still going forward. One day she would suddenly come upon it, as she did in her dreams. The flower-scented air of it was in her nostrils as she sat reluctantly rousing herself to take Alma’s cue. “There were millions of them.” It had never occurred to her that they were funny. Alma, even then, outside her set of grave romantic friendships, had seen almost everything as a comic spectacle and had no desire to go back. “Yes, weren’t they innumerable! And so large! It was a large one I saw. The very biggest Speck of all I think it must have been.”
“I expect it was Belinda.”
“Oh, my dear! Could you tell them apart?”
“Belinda was one of the middle ones. Absolutely square. I liked her for that and her deep bass voice and her silence.”
“Oh, but Miriam, such a heavy silence.”