But Laura said these things couldn’t be explained, and hurried on.
Much the liveliest of the beds had been the one she herself came out of, and her blood pressure—except during the last year of the War, when unceasing hard work, combined with a diet of practically continual boiled fish, reduced it to a comfortable normal—had always been higher than was convenient. This led her into excesses. She must be up and doing; she found it impossible to sit still. Vitality bubbled in her quick speech and danced in her black eyes. She was now thirty-five, round and stubby, fleet of foot and swift of reply, and her past was strewn with charities she had organised, dressmakers she had established, hat shops she had run, estate agencies she had started, hospital beds she had endowed, arts she had supported, geniuses she had discovered, and four lovers.
Four weren’t many, she thought, considering the piles her sister Terry had got through. Laura’s lovers had come and gone, as lovers do, and she hadn’t minded much, because neither had they. There was something too electric about her for love. She seemed to crackle in their very arms. This disconcerted them; and each in his turn married some one else.
For a long time now she had been bored, and bored violently, and by the time she came across Sally she had seen everything, been everything, heard everything and done everything; and the prospect of seeing and being and hearing and doing over and over again, till her joints cracked and her hair fell out, was boring her into fits.
Her father’s three wives had been the daughters of millionaires, whose pride it was to leave them all their money. Her father, rich before, had thus become incredibly richer. England was full of him. And the war had only made him richer, because he owned coal mines. Such riches, Laura considered, were disgusting, and she had plunged into Socialism, and come up dripping Labour. But whatever she did, whatever she was, her chief job was to look after her father, and see that his last years were peaceful; and she had now only left him in Cambridgeshire, where they had been spending Easter, for a day or two, and rushed up to London because of being obliged to go to a charity ball of which she was a patroness, to the first night of a play whose author she was encouraging, to a bazaar in aid of the Black and Blue League, of which she was vice-president and whose aims were the assistance of wives, and, if possible, to look in at a concert being given by a young violinist she had helped to have trained: and she had been thinking, as she sat in the empty railway carriage between Crippenham and Cambridge—the expresses stopped at Crippenham when the Duke was in residence—that all this was a great bore.
What was the good of it, really? Oughtn’t charity to be approached quite differently? Weren’t bazaars essentially vicious? Did wives need assistance more than husbands? And there was her own stupid supper-party that night after the play, with the author coming to it, and the leading lady, and Streatley her elder brother, who thought he admired the leading lady, and Terry her sister, who thought the author admired her, and Charles her younger brother, who was sure he admired nobody, and one or two others, including a dramatic critic; and how too perfectly awful if the play was a failure, and there they all were, boxed up with the person who had written it.
‘Silly life,’ she had been thinking as the train ran into Cambridge. ‘Round and round in a cage we go, and nothing is ever different except our whiskers, which keep on getting greyer.’
‘But then,’ she said leaning forward, her eyes twinkling and dancing as she looked at Sally, who by this time had finished her tea, ‘the door opened and you got in. Too marvellous, Sally. Divinely beautiful. And not an h in your whole delicious composition.’
‘Pardon?’ said Sally, who hadn’t quite got that.