“Until what?” asked Enid; and her music suddenly ceased. “Until something happened that I cannot understand,” said Joan, moving away.
“You are something I cannot understand,” said Enid Wimpole. “But I will play something else, if this annoys you.” And she fingered the music again with an eye to choice.
Joan walked back through the corridor of the music room, and restlessly resumed her seat in the room with the two lady secretaries.
“Well,” asked the red-haired and good-humoured Mrs. Mackintosh, without looking up from her work of scribbling, “have you discovered anything?”
For some moments Joan appeared to be in a blacker state of brooding than usual; then she said, in a candid and friendly tone, which somehow contrasted with her knit and swarthy brows—
“No, really. At least I think I’ve only found out two things; and they are only things about myself. I’ve discovered that I do like heroism, but I don’t like hero worship.”
“Surely,” said Miss Browning, in the Girton manner, “the one always flows from the other.”
“I hope not,” said Joan.
“But what else can you do with the hero?” asked Mrs. Mackintosh, still without looking up from her writing, “except worship him?”
“You might crucify him,” said Joan, with a sudden return of savage restlessness, as she rose from her chair. “Things seem to happen then.”