“My dear creature, I shall never know it. I’ll never be conscious of this highly unpleasant annihilation. It’s only the dread of it. And that doesn’t exist if you refuse to think of it.”
“But suppose there’s someone else you’re longing and longing to see again?”
“Now!” he cried, triumphantly. “Now we’re getting at the mystery of your life. It’s a dead lover!”
“Oh! You and your beastly obsession with lovers!” she cried, almost with a sob. “It’s a—child’s ghost....”
“Be thankful it’s out of this brutal, hostile world, then,” said Lawrence. “Where’s Rosaleen? She lives in another nice little world, all by herself.”
“Perhaps hers is the real world,” said Enid. “I wish I could think so.”
IV
It was a wonderful ecstatic evening, the sort Rosaleen expected of artists. The studio was crowded, suffocatingly hot, filled with a joyful young riot. Except for Lawrence, they were all young. There was Miss Gosorkus and a man she had brought, there were the two English girls with three of their countrymen, there was a male cousin of Miss Mell’s and three young ships’ officers known to her, and two old friends from her art school. There was a distrait young Frenchman desperately in love with Enid, and a lot of other people who drifted in and out. There was a terrific amount of noise; they were wilfully, exaggeratedly noisy; they sang, shouted and stamped. The old phonograph blared its loudest, and the couples danced as best they could in the crowd. They drank the punch and the champagne and grew wilder and wilder. Rosaleen, astonished and delighted, believed herself actually to be witnessing one of those “orgies” so often mentioned in the papers as taking place in artists’ studios. It was not till long, long afterward that she realised how innocent, how decent, how happy it really was, how young....
At first she was rather ignored. Enid was so dazzling that she captured all the strangers, and the rest of the crowd all knew Dodo Mell and went to her in preference to Rosaleen. But, by the time the thing was in full swing, she, too, had at last secured the exclusive attention of someone; she, too, like Enid, like Devery, younger of the English girls, like the two Art School girls, had a man standing at her side and admiring her when he wasn’t dancing with her. She didn’t know his name or who he was, but he was amusing and rather attractive; a curly-haired, black-eyed young man, looking rather like a sprightly devil, with outstanding ears which gave him a singularly alert air.
Suddenly, almost of one accord, they all wearied of dancing.