“Do you really believe that I don’t want to?” she asked. “If you only knew how much more they mean to me than they can to you—these walks! ... It’s out of the question, anyhow.”
That evening while she sat in the lounge, holding wool for her employer and compelled to listen to the discordant noise made by a group of the younger guests, gathered about the piano in the corner, Brenda’s thoughts wandered to the quiet beach. She pictured the warm satisfying serenity of the night out there under the starlit sky with the moan of the sea at one’s feet. How good it was! ... how good! ... It was hot in the house, despite the draughts created by open doors and windows; there was difficulty in breathing. One wanted to be outside walls, away from artificial lighting, out in the open in the quiet dusk, with no light but the stars.
Mrs Graham finished winding her wool and, with the exhausted air of a woman recently prostrated by some nervous disorder, proposed an adjournment to her room for the inevitable hour’s reading, which until now the girl had accepted as a matter of course and not found so unutterably wearisome.
With a limp disinclination that was an unspoken protest, she followed Mrs Graham downstairs and into a room on the left of the entrance, a pleasant room opening on to the stoep in front, and with access to a small conservatory. Mrs Graham touched the electric switch, and immediately the room was flooded with light.
“Shut die window,” she directed, “or we shall be eaten alive by mosquitoes.”
“But,”—Brenda paused—“it’s so hot.”
“Well, you can leave the fanlight open. It is as hot outside as indoors.”
The reading proved a miserable business. The best of readers would fail to interpret successfully the spirit of a work with a mind intent upon matters wholly outside the subject of the book. Brenda attempted conscientiously to capture her straying thoughts and tie them down to the prosaic present, but they evaded her and flew off at a tangent in pursuit of retrospective glamour. She reached out after them and brought them back, only to lose them almost immediately as, eluding her listless vigilance, they wandered anew in unbidden channels.
“I really think,” Mrs Graham’s voice broke in complainingly, “that you must go back and read those last few pages again. You’ve missed the sense somehow. There’s a want of relevance... You mustn’t skip.”
Brenda turned back without comment and endeavoured to fix her attention on the print, which conveyed no meaning whatever to her. The reading that evening was admittedly a failure.