Silvia had lost sight of Peter by now; he was round the corner, and how near that corner was, was immaterial. She wanted to put herself round the corner, too, and seized on this as a possible diversion.
“Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “I only came back this spring from three years in France.”
“There you are again! There’s another of your completenesses. You’re spread evenly, richly, like butter (when we’re all eating margarine) over the whole slice of life. I wish I could bite you! I believe that with a little trouble I could, and, if so, I should hate you, not for what you’ve got but for what I haven’t.”
At this moment Nellie became aware that her day in the wet woods had changed the character with which, prospectively, she had endowed it. She had meant, first with Peter as her companion, and next by herself, to enjoy the last hours of her celibacy. With Silvia, on the other hand, she was now not enjoying her own, but envying her companion’s. What she envied her most for was her decorated simplicity. Silvia wore her decorations externally; she didn’t attempt to swallow them and, by digestion, make them build up a complicated identity. Worst of all—from the envious point of view—she didn’t know how splendidly embellished she was.... It was as if you said to a gallant soldier, “Have you got the V.C.?” sarcastically almost, and then he looked down—not up—at his decorations, and found that the little piece of riband was there.
Silvia moved a shade away from her companion. The break in the thorn tree, with the consequent oval of hot sunlight, quite accounted for that.
“But what haven’t you got?” she asked. “You live, as naturally as drawing breath, the life that’s so new to me, and so puzzling and so delightful; and below and beyond all that, you’re on the point of being married. He chose you, out of all the world, and you found all the time that you had chosen him. What is there left for you, just you now and here, to want? You’re adorable——”
Silvia wrestled and threw the bugbear of shyness which so often sat on her shoulders and strangled her neck. There it writhed on the grass, not in the least dead, but, for the moment, knocked out.
“Oh, sometimes I wish I was a boy,” she said. “I’m more in that key than in ours. Sometimes I think——”
Nellie projected herself into that gap of sunlight from which, possibly, Silvia shrank. She had no definite scheme of exploration for the moment, but it seemed to her that something in the tangle of motives with which she had invited Silvia to share her afternoon was faintly stirring as if with unravelment. Those loops and knots might get more inextricably muddled, it is true; but, conceivably, the whole thing might “come out” like a conjuring trick.
“Ah, what is it that you think?” she asked. “Don’t stop so tantalizingly. As if thinking wasn’t everything! Whatever one does is only a clumsy translation of what one has thought. Think aloud!”