Ferdie Marcus was far too glad that Deb was occupied and amused to question the propriety of this bedroom intimacy. If all had gone well, if there had been no war, the poor child would have continued in possession of her own sitting-room in “Daisybanks,” where she had formerly received her friends—“ragged” with her friends was the mysterious term applied—Ferdie had, of course, appropriated it to his own use: “Na, my darling, did you have a good rag this evening?”... He gathered she was having a “rag” now; it was natural to her age; but everything that Deb did, he whittled to fit this assumption of nature—only natural that the child should want to be out—only natural that the child should want to be at home—“Leave them alone, Stella; Jenny Carew is always present; it is only natural that Deb likes the company of young folk. Forty-six, is he? All the better, then; a harmless fogey, almost as old as I am; it livens him up to be with Deb and the pretty little Carew—tells them tales of war ... ho! ho! the new Othello. Only, Stella ... Papa need not know what is going on—wass? He would not understand.”
Harmless? Certainly Burton Ames intended to be harmless. He did not believe himself in love with either Deb or Jenny. He valued them for their companionship, for their interest in himself, for their distinct and unique personalities. They were a stimulating find among the heterogeneous nomads of boarding-houses. He thought he liked them as two charming boys. With his scorn for platitudes and for platitudinous happenings, he underrated the dangers of propinquity. If one were careful ... his careful attitude was his undoing; it goaded Jenny and Deb out of shelter. They knew well enough that from their reliance on—well, on Cora, was sure to arise this equation of danger; they courted it, hunted it, even. Ames was such an insistently masculine factor in that room; a girl’s room. The very rough feel of his sleeve—Jenny knew ... every time she moved.... And she was a restless creature, forever thrilling her wings.
Jenny was just an atom of life-force, twinkling wildly, all the time, in every direction; jostling to be noticed, petted, admired; a gyrating dizzy mote in the sunslant; a savage little brown bundle of sexual impulses. That was primarily Jenny. Funnily opposed to this, some of her instincts and education and ways of speech were those of the typical suburban sparrow: she was suspicious of people who could correctly pronounce foreign languages; scoffed at what she called “highbrow stuff.” What else was Jenny than this? Most of all, perhaps, an insatiable mother; wearing herself out in service to anyone sick or bothered; proud of these calls on her reputation for quick practical efficiency. Cooking, bandaging, scrubbing—she had five brains on each hand. Her notion of spoiling a beloved person was by virtue of touch ... a smother of kisses ... chair and cushions and fire ... healing contact of warm flesh upon flesh ... cosseting ways that were all the realities she knew or cared about. “That sort of rubbish never did anyone a bit of good!” she would interrupt with almost shrewish impatience, when Deb and the soldier were astray in realms ethical or fantastic. Life was four walls and a roof—babies within, and the smell of dinner, and sacrifice, and somebody crying, and body’s pain.... A little fun to be squeezed in at the cracks; fun that was substantial, and never ethereal; fun that was crowds and a pretty dress, a waltz, chocolates, a bottle of wine, a ride in a motor-car....
And love was just touch again—for Jenny.
Jenny had no reserves and no discrimination; she could hastily damn a stranger to perdition without any attempt at sane reasoning—and a week later one would find her impenitently ensconced at the other extreme of judgment. She was not actually beautiful: a small, round head, and a small round chin; brown sloe eyes tilted at the outer comers; round the eyes and mouth a crinkling resemblance, mirthful, mournful, to a baby monkey; Bobby, her young son, had inherited this. But her eyebrows were delicate umber sickles on the low white forehead. And she could look all things in a second’s space of time....
Jenny had been given sordid tragedy for her lot on earth: poverty of the shoddiest kind; illness that had brought her three times gaspingly close to death. And she had come out well in the test ... better, perhaps, than a schooled philosopher. Loyal to Dolph, competent in the bread-struggle, plucky in the very extremities of pain. To Deb and the soldier she was a sort of Complete Home on tour. He, especially, seemed to rely on her for the daily wants of an ordinary man adrift and ill. For he was already a victim of the war; shell-shock and neurasthenia had left him incompetent for any more strenuous job than his present light ordnance duties. Jenny rejoiced in the very egoism which brought him to her at all times with some slow ponderous helplessness to confide: “Look here—what am I to do?”—She gave prodigally, without thought of barter. And as between her husband and Ames existed that casual masculine friendship which blooms mainly on the borrowing and lending of matches, she was able, under cover of this, to cosset him to her heart’s content; run into his room with soup and custards when he was laid up, ask for his clothes to patch and darn—all the little real things ... advantages of a married woman again.... Deb fretted against her own disabilities. It seemed that Jenny, without cheapening herself in the soldier’s esteem, could softly trail her fingers across his furrowed brows ... murmur: “Darling, how hot your head is!” ... Deb’s modesty bled in scarlet on her cheeks and neck. Jenny, how can you? how can you? ... and oh, if I could only do the same! But she was still dream-crusted with the convention that a man shall avow, and a girl deny or concede; could not force herself to reverse the process, even though Jenny scored—scored all the time.... The soldier’s head lay for an instant drawn back against Jenny’s shoulder. Jenny, magically stilled by the contact, was crooning a song that the sea might have composed to the beloved vessel at last in harbour. Deb, wistful of the other’s frank facility in wooing, redly ashamed lest the soldier should despise it, hating Jenny for giving him cause to despise it, mutinous at her own instinctive adherence to girlhood’s creed, Deb whispered to herself in promise for this empty moment: “When I am married....”
III
“When I am married”—and marriage is found with love as surely as the picture-coupon in the opened packet of cigarettes, inessential but inevitable. Yet here she had fallen in love where no ultimate together-being was possible; even no passionate response forthcoming. Then was this love at all?—hitherto accepted as a divided flame burning to some splendid fulfilment....