This abrupt termination of the presentment of Silvia in love, as imagined by her friend, was due to something quite unexpected. There came on Silvia’s face, as her own privacy was thus invaded, a dumb, but none the less violent signal of protest. She shrank and withdrew herself, as if a burglarious bullseye had been shot through the window of her room, where she lay lost in cool, soft maidenliness. The contact was even more direct than that; it was as if some pitiless incision had been made in her very flesh. But with this pause in the application of the knife, this shuttering of the bullseye—for any further beam would have disclosed the deliberate attempt to rifle the jewel-chest—there came the complete withdrawal of her protesting signal.... It had been the bullseye of a friend that looked in, the scissors of a dear amateur manicurist....
She was sitting there hatless in the shade, and with her hand she pushed her hair back.
“Oh, you’re a witch, Nellie,” she said. “Two hundred years ago you would have been burned, and I should have helped to pile the faggots. I expect that you’re magically right. I can’t tell, you know, because I assure you, literally and soberly, that I never have been in love. Literally never. Soberly never. But, somehow, what you suggested (how did you divine it, you witch?) touched something, made something vibrate and sing. I didn’t know anything about it; I didn’t know it was there. Then you put your finger on it, and I knew ... I knew I had it.”
“And then you just hated me for a moment,” said Nellie.
Silvia did not quite accept this.
“You made me wince,” she said in correction. “And, oh, yes, I’ll confess: just for a moment you seemed to me hostile and hurting. You aren’t; you’re heavenly and healing. You taught me, bless you. But I think you’re a witch all the same. It wasn’t telepathy; you told me something about myself that I didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, and can’t know now, for that matter. Oh, you lucky creature. You’ve fallen in love. You know it all. Did you do it in the manner you attribute to me? Did you savagely give, not wanting anything but to give, give.... How did you put it just now? To be allowed to love, to pour yourself out, to pay homage instead of exacting it? The boy’s key! My dear it seems ages and ages since that phrase came up. I’ve had a whole drama since then, you know.”
Nellie, in point of fact, had had her drama, too. But it was as yet undetermined. She had not got at the root facts for which she was burrowing. Silvia’s volley of questions, anyhow, were easy of response. They were, barring, a certain inversion, very Victorian questions, dating from the days when men blindly adored and women swooned at the declaration of the passion which they had done their level best to excite. But that inversion made to her, and for particular reasons, a wildly interesting speculation. Silvia, when she loved (so much was certain), would love in the “boy’s key,” the eager, evocative key. She acknowledged herself, in contemplation of the event, as blindly adoring, as being “allowed” to love. Whether that was entirely a prognostication, or whether it was already partially, potentially fulfilled was another question, and the application of that concerned Nellie, and her own purposes, alone. Soon, deftly now, with the lesson of Silvia’s revolt against surprises, she would get a further result from her dissection. At present there was the impatient, intimate volley of questions to answer.
“Oh, my dear, I understand so well the ‘boy’s key,’” she said. “A triumphal, victorious surrender, with all the bells ringing—isn’t that it? A march out with white flags insolently flying. I should love to be like that, if I was like that. But that isn’t my key. I just surrendered, rather terrified, you know. But I couldn’t be terrified of Philip for long: he’s such a dear.”
This could not be considered more than an approximate account, a vague sketch, very faintly resembling the scene it portrayed—a quiet, feminine disclosure. But Nellie did not want to discuss that; she wanted to get back to her tangled skeins again.
“I should like to see you in love, Silvia,” she said. “Promise to tell me when it happens. At least, you needn’t; it will be wonderfully obvious, you in your ‘boy’s key.’ Whom can we find for you who will just fall in with that, and be the complement of it, making, it complete and round and perfect? Hasn’t ever so little a bit of him, just the top of his head, come over the horizon yet?”