“Then you are two people,” said Catherine rather fiercely—“the superficial Maud who just now said I had all I wanted, implying happiness, and another Maud, who has to be fished for.”
That was less personal, less intricate, and Maud looked up again, smiling.
“Quite true,” she said. “But so are you two Catherines; so is everybody who is worth anything. I used to think you an ideally happy person, because, as far as one could see, you got all you wanted. I imagine it was what you call the superficial Maud who thought that; I don’t think the deep-down ‘you’ is happy.”
Maud paused a moment, feeling that her sister-in-law was hanging on her words. It did not seem to her that in this claim for unhappiness, so to speak, that Catherine had made she had in her mind the drug-taking: it was something different to that. Only lately, too, had she herself been conscious of this “deeper Maud,” which yet did not in the least affect the workings of the more superficial self. The joy of morning and evening, the depression and irritation of east wind, the rapture of catching sea-trout, went on, on the surface, just as keenly as ever, but an interior life had awoke.
“I used to envy you so, Cathy,” she said—“at least, I used to envy lots of things about you, when I thought that the ‘you’ which all the world knew and admired so was all there was. But now I believe that there is a greater ‘you’ than that, and that a realer ‘me’ than the ordinary thing perceives it. And since you ask me, I don’t think that essential part of you is happy, any more than Thurso is happy.”
Catherine sat down again, and thought over this before she answered.
“I would give, or give up, a great deal to make Thurso happy,” she said with absolute sincerity. “But I get on his nerves.”
Maud looked up, waiting for more—waiting for the completion of the sentence which she had heard not so long ago on Thurso’s lips. It came.
“And he bores me,” said Catherine.
There was a long silence. Bees buzzed in the flowers, making them bend and sway and nod to their weight; a grasshopper clicked and whirred on the lawn; swifts swooped and chided together in sliding companies; while the splash of oars or churn of a steamer sounded from the river. Then—such is the habit of the world—it struck them both how unlike themselves, unlike the ordinary presentment of themselves, that is to say, they were being, and simultaneously they swam out of the depths that were in reality the much more essential abode of them both. But the return to normal levels was short; they soon went down again; since those who have met or seen each other below always go back there. It is only those who have talked insincerely on deep matters who prefer to splash about on the surface. But a few surface remarks followed.