Well, here it was, the lovely little sitting-room....
She moved about in it, still unable quite to exorcise the idea that it would change. With eyes cast down, she made her way from part to part, imagined varnish on the floor. Flowers set about. People, hiding the chairs. It would be pain to bring friends in. Cruelty to ask anyone to endure the room for an hour.
There would be no tea-parties.
When her attention returned, Miss Holland’s dead belongings had changed a little. They were forgotten and familiar. Here, after all, was a room and a window, and the things were sufficient. Unobtrusive, like dowdy clothes. She remembered how, between-whiles, she loved dowdiness. How her heart went forth with mysterious desire to thoroughly dowdy, flat-haired women. Women who had no style but their set of beliefs.
Something of this kind must have drawn her to Miss Holland, even while she saw her only as a possible sharer of expenses....
Miss Holland had been brought by her star. She was moving about on the upstair landing in her heavy, light-footed way, busy and intent. She coughed. Her cough had exactly the sound of her voice.
Would it be possible to go through life in the state of permanent protest expressed by that eloquent cough? For a day perhaps. But a night’s sleep plays strange tricks.
Yet the shock of the furniture had confirmed her sense that something was being offered. Low-toned, apparently gloomy, yet having a strange fascination, a quality. If she put forth no resistance it might be the most exciting, revealing, adventure she had yet had. It was an offer; an offer of the chance of becoming a postulant châtelaine.
8
“But you make tea with a charm! This is Nectar!”