And I hated them both. Was surly behind politeness till she had gone. When at once I forgot she was still in the world. There’s stupidity. Enough to exclude from the élite of all worlds.
Yet Selina Holland is afraid of losing me.
Selina Holland has no doubt that death will transfer her into the presence of God. Yet she wants, for the time that remains to her, wide circumstances, ease. Is willing, for the sake of the ease and space she sees so clearly, to go to the ends of the earth. “Wide sky; unstinted air; room to move” exactly in the voice she uses for “Good Bermaline.”
A religious woman, living on prayer; blossoming, in middle age, into splendid health on the power of prayer and teaspoonsful of Listerine. Ready to give up her work amongst the poor and systematically seek wealth and comfort.
Perhaps in the end she will actually go; to California. Make her way. Master hotel-keeping as she has mastered hygiene and midwifery, and confectionery. Leave London as coolly as years ago she came. And contrive her transference just as she had contrived this holiday to Edinburgh. Ingeniously. Horrible ingenuity of genteel poverty: Two coats and skirts, one on the top of the other, and a little handbag. By the midnight train.
She despises the world, yet uses it. Is using it now to accumulate money. The being here with me is now altogether an affair of economy. But if I were religious, it would not be. I should be the centre of her personal life. She would try to get me to California. “Would you like to come?” and then answering herself before I had time to speak: “No; you are too cultured.” But that was long ago. Whilst there was still the sense of being her great adventure. Before the trouble about the letter. Before Miss Trevelyan came to tea. Badly dressed, with a cold in her head. Tall, like Miss Holland. Two tall figures sitting upright in front of the little fire, not lounging, sitting as if they were just going to move. Both looking into the fire, Miss Holland with a pleased smile, Miss Trevelyan stolidly, as she told without a break and almost without questions from Miss Holland everything that had happened to her family and friends during the year. She had Miss Holland’s indifference to surroundings and her obliviousness of differences in the quality of experience. Assumed that everything affected everyone in the same way.
“Miss Brown has married and gone to live in Birmingham.”
To hear them talk was to feel that one person was making remarks aloud; talking to herself of shadows in a dream. I began to understand why Miss Holland found me lively and charming.
And then, when they had formally said good-bye and Miss Trevelyan had gone out into the rain in her cloak: “A perfectly happy year together. We would both gladly repeat it.” I can see their year. A peaceful association of two workers. Both disciplined and incessantly active. Sharing disapprovals. Living as if in a siege; enclosed and conspiratorial and happy. Prayers and puns and loyally exchanged services. A life of perfect agreement untroubled by thought. And I am jealous. Perhaps it was then, knowing that if she still desired a renewal of life with Trevelyan, I was only second-best, that I really moved away from her. Feeling inferior as well as superior to Miss Trevelyan. Feeling hidden in them both something I cannot reach. That I shall reach one day and meet them suddenly, when they have both passed out of my life. Something they have given without knowing it.
It is since then that she has more and more effaced herself and no longer courted every opportunity of standing, if only for a moment and deprecatingly, at fresh angles of vision. Miss Trevelyan reinforced her. But she still thinks there ought to be personal affection between us. Doesn’t notice that I can’t call her Selina.