“Never. In women, absolutely never, once it’s there.”
“She’s an amazing person. Can fall out of a moving cab without being hurt. She said, of course, that she knew. But wanted to hear all about him.”
“You were able to render her a charming service.”
“No. It frightened me for her sake that she wanted to talk about him. Of course, she thought me tongue-tied. I was. But only because feeling that her best realisation was just that moment with me. If we had talked, there would have been a wilderness of detail, and the moment gone without taking its full effect.”
“Yet it is most natural that she should have wished to talk of him.”
“It frightened me. She had a charming white hat.”
Though she went on for a while humouring Miss Holland’s desire for pictures and stories, she now framed her discourse in ready-made phrases, and was interested in seeing the way they made effects such as she herself had often gathered up from heard conversations, and in discovering how they fitted a shape of thought about life and led on automatically to other phrases, little touches that finished them off; till she began to believe that life was expressible in these forms of thought which yet she knew left everything untouched.
But the centre of her interest, the thing that was making her talk grow absent and careless, and consist more and more of sounds in response to Miss Holland’s lingering consideration of all that had pleased her, was the way that unawares during their long sitting the room had come to life. Nothing now looked dingy. There was a warm brightness; within the air.
When their talk had drifted to a pause and she was alone, she ruefully regarded the day’s interchange. Shadowless only by being an excursion into a world she had long ago ceased to inhabit. By using only materials that would make common ground, she had woven a fabric of false impressions.