Anne’s tone and the words themselves sounded hopeless, and certainly her physical self was hopeless. But in the instant of giving in to sheer physical defeat she had also given in to an eerie kind of delight of the spirit. She knew that good was coming, coming, coming, creaming up toward her from every side into a surf of light in her heart.
Ariel turned back to her. “I’m tired too,” she confessed. “How far have we come, do you suppose? Where are we?”
“A hundred miles or so, and we can’t be any distance at all from Scarborough, if it’s still on the map and not taking a holiday. If we can win on to that burg we can get a snack to eat and then catch a local to New York. But why aren’t there any automobiles out? Too thick a storm? If we could get picked up! What was exactly your idea, anyway, in this form of recreation, Ariel? I’m just begun to get brains enough to inquire into it.”
“I don’t know, myself,” Ariel murmured. “Only, after last night, you know, I had to walk, run, or swim. It was the only way to—to uncoil it from me. Let’s start on and pray for a motor to come along, a kind one.”
But very soon they got their second wind. Their legs still felt that they might break off at hip or knee, but this had gradually become only an interesting sensation, for their bodies as units began to discount the thousands of separate fatigue messages sent by separate nerves and had grown beautifully light. The girls were moving ahead now—on, on, on, with no need to whip up their wills. If they should learn that they must walk on like this until night they would not rebel. And they began talking as freely as without effort they walked.
“I know what you mean about uncoiling it—all that last night’s stuff,” Anne exclaimed. “Every step uncoils me. But I feel, Ariel, as if my feet must leave a trail of slimy sticky awfulness behind me in the snow. Only why should you need to uncoil, Ariel? You weren’t going to slide down into the dark water to slip out under the ice. You hadn’t separated from yourself.”
“No. But you’d always horrified me a little. I felt that you were trapped in some dangerous, dreadful way, when I first saw you. And last night it all got real for me. It’s more than as if you’d told me, Anne. It’s as if I’d been in your trap with you and had wanted to die too—and all. I can’t explain myself. But it’s all uncoiling now, every step we take, and the snow is blotting it up. Don’t you feel it?”
“Life is strange, isn’t it!” Anne observed, with as fresh a wonder as though the idea itself were fresh. “Do you know, I hardly was aware of you at all during vacation except toward the last, when I hated you so. Before that I only thought of you in your relation with Hugh. I thought it a pity you weren’t colorful enough to make some sort of a stab at cutting Joan out with him. Not colorful! Stupid, even! Imagine! And now I know that you’re the best thing in the Weyman family, except, possibly, Grandam. But you and Grandam might be sisters. No, not family—race! You are beings of the same race. That’s it. The angel race.”
“Oh, hush! How idiotic!” Ariel wasn’t flattered. She was humiliated.
“Ariel! Have you ever been in love?”