“She’s a sweet kid, but she wrings one dry,” was the deity’s confidential version to Deb. “She writes to me every day, long unpunctuated letters all about whether certain people make you feel certain feelings, and other feelings make you see certain colours, and certain people make you see red.... And then she comes to see me, and says ‘I didn’t want to come really—You didn’t want me, did you?’ And I have to be hectic——”
“And she says: ‘Yes, but you don’t say that as if it was real,’” Deb guessed.
“Oh, Deb, what shall I do with her? One can almost love the child and one wouldn’t hurt her for worlds, but we sit in long heavy muffled impenetrable silences like slow sinking into a feather bed ... and then she shoots out at me ‘You’re different to-day somehow, aren’t you?’ And I guiltily try to be the same, but I don’t know what to be the same as. And I get a swift brown look and: ‘What are you thinking of?’—When ten to one I’m not thinking of anything worth while—well, I mean nothing she’d like me to be thinking of. So I say, ‘One can’t always tell one’s thoughts and feelings, can one?’ ‘No—but one would like to, wouldn’t one? At least I suppose mine aren’t up to much.... But I wonder——’”
“And you say ‘What?’ and she says ‘Nothing’—and then it begins all over again. I’m sorry, Jill; I let you in for this.”
“Don’t blame yourself. She saps my strength rather, but I’m fond of young Nell, and she’s lovely to look at—as Timothy Fawcett seems to have found out.”
“They never get any forrarder though, do they?”
“Bless him—and bless them both. They can afford to waste three or four years in being shy. Theo and I did.”
Deb laughed outright at the comparison of the two wooings.... “I wonder——”
“What?”
“Nothing!”