Now what is to be done next?—I would like to go and confide in the Duchesse, and tell her that I believe I have fallen in love with my secretary, who won't look at me, and ask her advice—but that I fear with all her broad-minded charity, her class prejudice is too strong to make her really sympathetic. Her French mind of the Ancien Régime could not contemplate a Thormonde—son of Anne de Mont-Anbin—falling in love with an insignificant Miss Sharp who brings bandages to the Courville hospital!
These thoughts tormented me so all yesterday that I was quite feverish by the evening—and Burton wore an air of thorough disapproval. A rain shower came on too, and I could not go up on the terrace for the sunset.
I would like to have taken asperines and gone to sleep, when night came—but I resisted the temptation, telling myself that to-morrow she would come again.
I am dawdling over this last chapter on purpose—and I have re-read the former ones and decided to rewrite one or two, but at best I cannot spread this out over more than six weeks, I fear, and then what excuse can I have for keeping her? I feel that she would not stay just to answer a few letters a day, and do the accounts and pay the bills with Burton. I feel more desperately miserable than I have felt since last year—And I suppose that according to her theory, I have to learn a lesson. It seems if I search, as she said one must do without vanity, that the lesson is to conquer emotion, and be serene when everything which I desire is out of reach.
Saturday Night:
To-day has been one of utter disaster and it began fairly well. Miss Sharp turned up at eleven as I shut my journal. I had sent to the station to meet her this time—She brought all the work she had taken away with her on Thursday, quite in order—and her face wore the usual mask. I wonder if I had not ever seen her without her glasses if I should have realized now that she is very pretty—I can see her prettiness even with them on—her nose is so exquisitely fine, and the mouth a Cupid's bow really—if one can imagine a Cupid's bow very firm. I am sure if she were dressed as Odette, or Alice, or Coralie, she would be lovely. This morning when she first came I began thinking of this and of how I should like to give her better things than any of the fluffies have ever had—how I would like her to have some sapphire bangles for those little wrists and a great string of pearls round that little throat—my mother's pearls—and perhaps big pearls in those shell ears—And how I would like to take her hair down and brush it out, and let it curl as it wanted to—and then bury my face in it—those stiff twists must take heaps of hair to make.—But why am I writing all this when the reality is further off than ever, and indeed has become an impossibility I fear.
We worked in the sitting-room—it was a cloudy day—and presently, after I had been dreaming on in this way, I asked her to read over the earlier chapters of the book.—She did—.
"Now what do you think of the thing as a whole?" I asked her.
She was silent for a moment as though trying not to have to answer directly, then that weird constitutional honesty seemed to force out the words.
"It perhaps tells what that furniture is."