"Milk! Biscuits! As if I could eat anything at a time like this! You are the most unromantic person."
"It's safer," said Theresa wearily. She made a deeper nest for her tawny head, and dismissed Grace's light affairs. They became negligible in the face of the tragedy she knew, and with the closing of her eyes she shut them from her mind. She prayed that sleep would bring the mountains, the clean mountains which, after all, could not be smirched by human beings, and they came to her. She saw them, tall, dark, superb, and inviolable, and she woke with something of their courageous peace.
[CHAPTER XIII]
Theresa had not the prophetic gift, but she garnered her experiences; she had good judgment and, when it pleased her, she could use wisdom in her dealings with her kind, so that, two months later, when Grace came to her, sore over the sufferings of the young man with the undeveloped head, yet still determined to be cruel to him, Theresa received her without surprise or any reference to the promised eternity of Grace's love.
"It was a great mistake," Grace said ingenuously. "I'm afraid I like admiration, and I can't help liking people who give it me."
"You must like the whole world, then. What a big heart to carry!"
"It's not quite as big as that, and you take up a lot of room in it, Terry, though you think I'm such a silly."
"You'll improve," said Theresa cheerfully.
She was able to be cheerful, for two months is a long time at seventeen, and the pain of her spirit was dulled: she had become used, though not reconciled, to the sight of a familiar figure, branded with shame. She no longer compared his every word and action with the truth she knew of him, for the beautiful green growth of custom was hiding the staring ugliness of her discovery. It was there, underneath, but now and then she was able to forget it, and that capacity almost persuaded her sometimes that her imagination had played her false. She watched him. He was the same man, it appeared, but for the shrinking wonder with which he looked at her, hurting her, striking doubt into her young criticism of things beyond her. Was it his guilt or her cold treatment which had cast this visible shadow over him? It should have been his guilt, but he had offended and yet gone clear of cloud before she found him out. It was her frowns that troubled him, and while she hated the immature self-righteousness which forced them from her, she could not keep them back; a smooth brow would have been disloyalty to the woman over whom he bent with a hypocrisy so perfect that it seemed impossible. She had hard work to restrain articulate scorn, but her curled lips did duty, exiling him to that desert place whence he could not see her smiles. In these days his shoulders became more bent, and Theresa learnt how he had looked in the shops where he was afraid of people's eyes. The knowledge shook her; he was like a frightened child who longs for kindness, and only by repeating those beating words could she forbear from putting her arms round his neck and kissing him under the brows. She longed to do it; her love fluttered and struggled in her breast, so that she had to quiet it with the pressure of her hand, and this was the beginning of a habit which never left her.