"Oh, well, one must do something! I pretend there are wolves after me, or assassins. It makes life so much more interesting. I get through everything like that, except dusting. I can't make up anything about dusting, it's the dullest thing."
"I wish I had time to do it for you. I like the look of things afterwards."
"I can never see any difference. I'm not doing my natural work."
"What's that?"
"Oh, if you need telling——" She retired to the study and sat in the cold before a sheet of paper, with a pencil in her hand. The immortal poem was her natural work, but how could she find time to write it with a household of six people to care for? Her mother breakfasted in bed, Uncle George was fastidious about his meals. Grace needed them at any odd and inconvenient moment, and Theresa found herself a better cook than Bessie. With a cake in the oven it was not easy to compose her mind to the calm necessary for her first arresting lines: the family liked her cakes, and praise was dear to her; therefore the poem and, she feared, the public suffered, and sometimes at the thought of what circumstances would not let her do, her body became a vessel for hot, tumultuous anger. She felt it churning within her, and she longed to raise her hands and strike. At these times she hated Bessie, she chafed at her mother's weakness, she scorned Grace, she despised her father and she took pains to plan annoyance for her uncle. After all, was it not he who had caused this trouble? she would say, and somewhat against her will, for she liked a reputation for good management, she would forget to order the packet of dried cereals which formed his meal at supper-time, so that he would be forced to eat meat and have indigestion, or to go hungry. But a growing pride in her task soon disdained these tricks, and she became almost maternally interested in his appetite.
"You're not eating your cream," she told him one night. "I got it specially for you. That stuff looks so husky. It makes me think of the Prodigal Son."
He ignored the Biblical allusion and looked at her with a cold disregard for her juvenile irreverence.
"I must use my natural juices," he assured her. He looked singularly bereft of them. His face, clean-shaven but for short grey whiskers, was as dried and colourless as his cereals, his grey hair was stiff and dull, his hands were lean without nervousness.
Watching him, the twitching of her lips grew into a smile. She began to like him. In his nature there was something grim and uncompromising which enabled him to keep his teeth shut on speech and the expression of his religious convictions. She recognized that this gift, or his wisdom, had thwarted her. She had meant to tease him, to taunt him with his Seaman's Club, where, on Saturday nights, the strains of the harmonium he had carried there droned a melancholy yet compelling welcome to the loafers about the docks, but she was robbed of opportunity. He never spoke of his pursuits, seldom of himself, and she was startled into a friendly pity for him. He had wanted a home and, at last, unwillingly, he had been admitted into this one, yet here, in the place of his desire, he sat silent and reserved, carefully keeping even a mental aloofness from the doings of his relatives. Was this gratitude, or a fear of ejection? And did he find any happiness among them? She frowned, for her heart was softening, and she foresaw that when she had time, when that poem was written, she would have to turn her powers to the understanding of him. This was capitulation, she confessed, but then, she comforted herself, analysis of men and women was important for her future.
He looked up, caught her puzzled, eager stare, and smiled. Smiling, too, she nodded. Really, she thought, why has not someone fallen in love with him?