She had an impression it was five hundred.
“An impression!” He was scornful. Women’s knowledge invariably consisted of impressions. Mrs Martyn, who liked to be rude herself, was always crushed by retaliation in the same coin. She escaped, and clung to Mrs Ravenhill.
“My dear, protect me! That man is a bear. He can never have been used to any society at all. Everything that I say to him he contradicts flatly, and comes out with the most disagreeable speeches! I daren’t say a word. He frightens me. And why does he choose me—poor, inoffensive me?”
Anne, as she walked up from the landing-place, got hold of Millie.
“You are really going to break away to-morrow? I envy you.”
“I am sorry,” Millie said simply. “There is so much more which I want to see.”
Anne answered her abruptly—
“It is like everything else. Life is just an air with variations, and you get sick of the air. I am tired of mountains and fjords. More tired of hearing people cry, ‘How beautiful!’”
“When they say it of yourself?”
“Most of all. Yet when it doesn’t come, I miss it.” She laughed.