‘Oh no—don’t get a gramophone. Please, Chris darling. I can’t learn to dance. I don’t want to. I’m sure I never could. You must go to dances without me.’
‘Without you! I like that. As though I’d ever go to anything, or budge an inch, without you.’
At this time they had been married five weeks.
There came another letter from Virginia; not quite so warm, because nobody can keep at the same temperature uninterruptedly for weeks, but still continuing to invite.
‘We hope you and Mr. Monckton are soon coming here, dearest mother,’ she wrote in her round, childish handwriting. ‘I have to lie up most of the time now, because I’ve begun the seventh month, and mother says that that is the one to be most careful in, so that if you were to come now we could have some nice quiet talks. Stephen is visiting in the parish, but I think if he were here he would ask me to give you his love.’
How far away it sounded. Another life, dim and misty. Stephen had evidently told her nothing of his monstrous suspicions. Virginia was prepared, dutifully as always, to accept her mother’s new husband. She had disliked him very obviously that day at Chickover, but now she was going to do her duty by him, just as she did her duty by everybody who had a claim on it.
Catherine sighed, holding the letter in her hand. It seemed like the splashing of cool water, a distant, quiet freshness, compared to her fevered, strange, rapturous—but was it really rapturous?—life now.
An ache of longing to see Virginia stole into her heart. One’s children and new husbands—how difficult they were to mix comfortably. Mothers, to be completely satisfactory, must be ready for sacrifice, and more sacrifice, and nothing but sacrifice. They mustn’t want any happiness but happiness through, by, and with their children. They must make no attempt to be individuals, to be separate human beings, but only mothers.
She sat staring at herself in the glass, thinking. When the letter arrived she was at her dressing-table, going through the now long and difficult process of doing her face. Mrs. Mitcham had brought the post in on tiptoe—she always now approached Catherine on tiptoe—laid it on the table, and stolen out again quickly, neither looking to the right hand nor the left, for by this time experience had taught her that if she did look what she saw was likely to be upsetting.
Catherine paused in what she was doing to open the letter, and then sat idly twisting it round her finger. She had been told of a woman in Sackville Street by Kitty Fanshawe who ‘did’ faces, and had gone at once and had hers done, and had been enchanted by the result. No more elementary lip-sticks and powder for her. In this elegant retreat, at the back of the building away from all noise, soothing to the nerves merely to go into, she had lain back in a deep delicious chair, and an exquisite young woman, whose own face was a convincing proof of the excellence of the treatment, did things with creams and oils and soft finger-tips; and when at the end—it was so soothing that Catherine went to sleep—a hand-glass was given her and she was told to look, she couldn’t help an exclamation of pleasure.