That she had all the makings of a fanatic, he had long suspected, and the Canon’s determination to treat her as an invalid, in need of rest and complete inaction, seemed to him to be a singularly ill-advised one.
In spite of his disapproval of her methods, Quentillian had come to feel a certain affection for Flora, and he could not avoid a sense of complicity that drew him to her, even while it chafed his self-righteousness.
With an entire lack of originality, he informed Lucilla that he thought her sister would be better away from home.
“Well, so do I. But even to go away for a few weeks would only be a half-measure. Owen, I’m frightened about Flora—far more than I’ve ever been about anyone before.”
He could partly apprehend her meaning.
“Don’t you think that perhaps this—phase—is only another manifestation of the same spirit that made Val want to go and work somewhere?”
“In a sense, yes. You see, all the intellectual interests, and the mental appreciations, to which we were brought up, although those things did fill our days—at least before the war—were only superimposed on what Val and Flossie and Adrian really were, in themselves. Not essentials, I mean, to either of them.”
Quentillian wondered what Lucilla’s own essentials might be. She had given him no hint of them, ever, and yet he suspected her of an almost aggressive neutrality with regard to the imposed interests of which she had spoken.
The odd contradiction in terms seemed to him expressive of the difference that he felt certain existed between Lucilla’s daily life, and the personal, intimate standpoint from which she all the time regarded that life.
Something of the same ruthlessness of purpose that had once characterized Flora, he had always discerned in Lucilla, but he felt very certain that her essential sanity and humour would have kept her forever from the strange and tortuous means adopted by Flora to safeguard those interests of which she apparently felt herself to be a better judge than her Creator.