She, and letting herself go! She struggled to keep her laughter safe muffled inside her scarf. She hadn’t laughed since last she was with Christopher. At Chickover nobody laughed. A serious smile from Virginia, a bright conventional smile from Mrs. Colquhoun, no smile at all from Stephen; that was the nearest they got to it. Laughter—one of the most precious of God’s gifts; the very salt, the very light, the very fresh air of life; the divine disinfectant, the heavenly purge. Could one ever be real friends with somebody one didn’t laugh with? Of course one couldn’t. She and Christopher, they laughed. Oh, she had missed him.... But he was so headlong, he was so dangerous, he must be kept so sternly within what bounds she could get him to stay in.
She therefore continued to turn her back on him, for her face, she knew, would betray her.
‘You haven’t been happy down here, that I’ll swear,’ said Christopher. ‘I saw it at once in your little face.’
‘You needn’t swear, because I’m not going to pretend anything. I haven’t been at all happy. I was very angry with you, and I was—lonely.’
‘Lonely?’
‘Yes. One misses—one’s friends.’
‘But you were up to your eyes in relations.’
Silence.
Then Catherine said, ‘I’m beginning to think relations can’t be friends—neither blood relations, nor relations by marriage.’
‘Would you,’ asked Christopher after a pause, during which he considered this remark, ‘call a husband a relation by marriage?’