"Do you know, Angelica," Polly said to her one day, "the very nicest thing about you is that you never fidget!"
Angelica considered that.
"No," she said. "I know I don’t. I see other people squirming and wriggling all the time, and I wonder—I don’t know—I am quiet; but I’ve got lots of life in me."
"I should say you had! Just my antithesis, aren’t you? I’m quiet, too, but it’s because I haven’t any life in me at all."
"Well," said Angelica, displaying no interest in Polly’s state of mind, and reverting, as she generally did, to herself, "I’m always kind of expecting something to happen. So I just—wait."
Her naïve egoism never affronted Polly. Disillusioned, she would have been rendered uneasy by affection or great interest; she liked it this way, with no pretense on either side, nothing to keep up. She never affected any interest in Angelica, although she couldn’t attain her companion’s supreme self-absorption. She was obliged, now and then, to ask a question; in fact, she couldn’t help being curious about Angelica, who was not at all curious about her.
She was sometimes a little piqued by the young creature’s cool assumption that she was of no interest. She knew, as all other people know, what lay within herself, how different she was from every one else who had ever lived, how interesting she was, both in her qualities and her experiences, a thing true of every one; and yet how impossible it is to make others see it!
Polly was a woman of curious temperament—intense, sensitive, flexible, and yet protected and perhaps isolated by a certain cool good sense. She was an artist, a musician, a woman who had twice loved and twice been most cruelly deceived and rebuffed, who had suffered and thought very much and very bitterly, if not very profoundly; but she was also the simple daughter of a small town, a woman who liked a long and leisurely gossip, who had sane and healthy blood flowing beneath her idle hypochondria. Woman of the world, smoker of cigarettes, reader of the most astounding books, seasoned as she was, disillusioned, heart-sick, a bit theatrical, perhaps, in her utter indifference, she was nevertheless the same Polly who would have heartily enjoyed a day spent in jelly-making, or nut-gathering, or sewing with a friendly and talkative group of her own Ohio women.
She had very little in common with Mrs. Russell. They didn’t really like each other, but being unoccupied, and in somewhat similar circumstances, they got on well enough together. The whole household got on together, in fact. There were intrigues, incredibly petty and subtle struggles and plots, but nothing overt.
The other two women accepted this new favourite of Eddie’s with resigned tolerance; they made use of her, but they were quite kind. They, too, had an influence on Angelica; they taught her something, a little of the compromise that must be made with life. You didn’t have to love people or to hate them—you had only to get on with them. She could not but admire their charming good-humour, their complete lack of the aggressiveness which the people she had known before had been obliged to cultivate. They were all three so comfortable together!