Andrée was very irritating about such matters. She wouldn’t keep away from things and people and facts that troubled and tormented her. That pool, for instance.... She would argue Edna into going there with her and insist upon lingering beside it, looking into the dark depths of the water, standing in its icy shallows, laying her hands against the wet moss-grown rocks, until she became so filled with her absurd dreads and fancies that even the sensible Edna would become infected.
They had been there that morning; they had sat on a fallen tree and stared at the quiet pool, the dark face of the cliff over which the puny trickle of water ran, ran, ran, had been running, just in this way, for God knows how many centuries. And suddenly they had seen a great black snake, swimming rapidly and silently on its way. They had fled in a panic, barefooted over the stones and rough ground, out to the ravine and into the sun again.
Edna had been angry.
“Why will you go there!” she cried. “You’re so morbid!”
There was nothing morbid about Edna; she was a distractingly pretty thing of nineteen, very like her mother in her young days as far as appearance went—small, slight, self-confident, with crisp fair hair like a halo about a flower-like face. She was alert, independent and unsociable; her most profound instinct was to keep silent, to stay alone, to be untouched, undisturbed while her strong spirit grew. She was a disappointment to her mother because she was so difficult, so impossible to influence. She wished to take every new idea and run off with it, to examine it alone, in peace; she never wanted to talk over anything. Nor did she care much for reading. She observed, and she made deductions from her observations, she formed intelligent opinions, she judged people with sane and kindly indifference.
But she did not understand, as Andrée did. Andrée apparently never did any thinking. She simply knew things, spontaneously. She knew what people would do, what they were, she loved them or hated them. And she was forced to discuss everything with everybody, to talk, to think, until her brain was sick and frightened. She couldn’t quite believe anything or quite doubt anything. She was a thin, tall girl of twenty, pale, distrait, not very pretty, but with a face wonderfully mobile and sensitive. There was a perverse charm about her, about her moods, her immature high-mindedness, her terrible dependence upon others. She would ask your opinion, and if it differed from hers she would begin to doubt herself, and if you agreed with her, she was obliged to change her mind....
They had got their shoes and stockings on and set off by a convenient path for the little hotel.
“If only we didn’t have to eat with all those people!” said Andrée, sighing. “It takes my appetite away. I do so hate the noise they make ... and those awful babies!”
Edna laughed at her.
“Poor grandma always used to call you ‘pernicketty.’ And you are, aren’t you? They’re not such bad people.”