She watched the postman, too. Letters, addressed in Alexander's writing, came from the farm among the hills: they were thick and sometimes sealed, and the eagerness with which her father took them to his room convinced her that they held enclosures. At such times he seemed to her like an animal secreting food, and the striving love lay still.
On an evening when this had happened, she sat with her mother by the breakfast-room fire. It was May, but a cold wind rattled the windows, and Nancy had her feet inside the fender and a shawl round her shoulders. Theresa was sewing, as a silent protest against the ardent letter-reading upstairs. Her lips were tightened, and conscious virtue enveloped all of her but the hair that flamed in love's own colour. She was now eighteen, and the hair was massed on her head, overweighting it, strengthening the pallor of a face where only a few golden freckles broke the white.
She shivered. "May is the worst month of all," she said, and threw down her sewing. "Such light, long evenings, and spring's news almost old. It makes me miserable."
"I wish you would go out more, dear."
"I took Uncle George for a walk yesterday, and Father the day before."
"That's not what I mean. Why will you never go with Grace?"
"I don't fit in. I feel like a great piece of furniture when I'm with her friends. I can't talk as they do. They have a way of making jokes—all about nothing and really not a bit funny—that turns me dumb. I don't know how they can think of such imbecilities." She did not add that she envied their facility, that their gay scraps of talk, their ease in each other's company, the way in which they wore their clothes and did their hair, shamed her for her silent awkwardness and robbed her of any comfort in the belief that she was alien because she was unique. Her eyes were quick, but they did not see that though she lacked the loveliness she had always wanted, her face had the beauty of her swift and vivid spirit, she had the pliant grace of a larch, the freshness of its early green and the courage which has caused that tree to be set in wild and desolate places. She thought the more highly of the intellect, and in this region she was aware that she overtopped the women of her acquaintance and the men with whom they danced, and laughed, and talked with such incomparable ease.
Nancy uttered a platitude serenely. "It takes all sorts to make a world," she said.
"I know, but there don't seem to be any of my sort—and I could be a friend!"
"You are a friend, dear, to me and Father and Uncle George and Grace. Since you began to take care of us all, I think I've never been so happy. You mustn't think I haven't seen, and now I want to tell you in case I never have another chance. My heart was very bad last night—but don't tell Father. Don't worry him. The attacks must come, and one of them will take me with it. I don't want to tell anyone but you, Terry, and I tell you because you're strong."