She resumed her story after a pregnant silence. The sound of the sea soothed her with its rhythm.
‘A few days afterwards I came to St. Margaret’s. And then....’
She stopped speaking. Hypatia looked up to find her gaze fixed upon the horizon.
‘Well?’ said Hypatia gently, after a long pause. ‘Did he forget all about you or something of that sort?’
‘No,’ answered Sheila, ‘he didn’t forget. He kept writing me letters.’
‘Why, of course! Didn’t you want him to?’...
The first letter made her eyes moist with tenderness; but every one that followed came with a whisper of impending tragedy. He wrote always of the church, of the office, of the garden, of the Band of Hope: round these things his immortal soul revolved.
Next Sunday fortnight I am to give a paper at the Young People’s Bible Class. Mr. Dewick asked me if I would and he said he would be very pleased if I would say yes and I could not very well get out of it as I had no excuse ready. I have chosen for my subject Sunday Observance; it is a good subject but I find it hard to put many thoughts down on paper about it. I will write and tell you how I get on. We had a really broad-minded sermon last Sunday on the text ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ it upset some of the very strict people I fancy but Mr. Dewick liked it and so did I. The preacher, whose name I forget, he was from Barnet, said that there had been some quite good atheists, but I thought he took a very extreme view when he said that some atheists lived much better lives than the average christian. It seemed to me that he put that bit in just so as to sound paradoxical and daring. Father has been very busy in the garden, pruning his roses, as the weather has greatly improved these last few days. There is a new fellow now at the office, but I cannot say I like him much, he is a bit of a rough diamond; rough anyhow, I am not so sure about the diamond. I think he drinks and he certainly uses bad language, but if one tells him of it he only gets more offensive. By the by, isn’t it funny that you should be still at school while I’m at business when we are both seventeen and within a few months of each other?
Passages like this frightened Sheila by indicating a gulf of mental disparity fixed between Kay and her. ‘It’s only superficial,’ whispered her love. ‘He’s not like that really. He’s not a good letter-writer: that’s all.’ And she tried to silence her own critical spirit with tender memories of his wooing. ‘Can love be scared away by a bad literary style?’ she asked herself. But her mind worked on against her: by no manner of violence could she prevent its probing into the substance of Kay’s frequent letters. In spite of her protests it coined for her a new word, Kayesque, to express a certain indefinable quality, a taint, manifest in his way of thinking and writing. Indefinable or not, it was undefined, for she dared not define it. To have confessed even to herself that it meant complacency, mediocrity, total absorption in the commonplace, would have precipitated disaster.
And to quicken her faculty for detecting the Kayesque there was the constant companionship of Hypatia Fairfield. From the moment when Sheila woke, one midnight, to find Hypatia sitting up in bed reading by candlelight The City of Dreadful Night the two girls were fast friends. This was but one book from the secret hoard of five that Hypatia discovered to Sheila on that exciting night. She found the school library altogether too prim, too like Miss Fry the head, to suit her taste.