“The eldest Featherstonhaugh.” She spoke carelessly; sat half turned away from him serenely smoking; a small buff cigarette in a long amber tube; but her voice vibrated.
He was reading, in her presence, a book she had written.... Those pages were proofs.... My arrival was an interruption in a companionship that made conversation superfluous.... What need for her to talk when she could put into his hands, alive and finished, something that she had made; that could bring into his face that look of attention and curiosity. How not sit suspended, and dreaming, through the small break in her tremendous afternoon? Yet he was getting the characters mixed up....
“And Cyril. Do I know Cyril?”
She had put people in.... People he knew of. They joked about it. Horrible.... She gazed, revolted and fascinated, at the bundle of pages. Someone ought to prevent, destroy.... This peaceful beauty.... Life going so wonderfully on. And people being helplessly picked out and put into books.
“This is the episode of the greenhouse!” His voice broke on the word into its utmost wail of amusement.
That was ‘writing’; from behind the scenes. People and things from life, a little altered, and described from the author’s point of view. Easy; if your life was amongst a great many people and things and you were hard enough to be sceptical and superior. But an impossibly mean advantage ... a cheap easy way. Cold clever way of making people look seen-through and foolish; to be laughed at, while the authors remained admired, special people, independent, leading easy airy sunlit lives, supposed, by readers who did not know where they got their material, to be creators. He was reading on steadily now, the look of amused curiosity gone.
Alma came over with a box of cigarettes and a remark; kindly thinking she might be feeling left; offering distraction. Or wishing to make her behave, launch out, with pretended interest upon a separate conversation, instead of hanging upon theirs. Of course she was sitting staring, without knowing it.... And already she had taken a cigarette and murmured an answer obliviously, and Alma had gone, accepting her engrossment, humming herself about amongst the trees, missing his remarks. Deliberately asserting a separate existence? Really loving her garden and enjoying the chance of being alone? Or because she knew all he had to say about everything. She came back and subsided in a low chair near Miss Prout just as he dropped his pages and looked out on to the air with a grave unconscious face. Lost in contemplation. This woman, so feminine and crafty, was a great writer. Extraordinary. Impossible. In a second he had turned to her.
“How do you do it, Edna? You do it. It’s shattering, that chapter-end.”
Miss Prout was speechless, not smiling. Crushed with joy.... Alma, at her side, smiled in delight, genuine sympathetic appreciation.
“I’m done in, Edna,” he wailed, taking up the leaves to go on, “shan’t write another line. And the worst of it is I know you’ll keep it up. That I’ve got to make; before dinner; my—my via dolorosa; through your abominably good penultimate and final chapters.”