Well, in a day or two she would take the lid off, but tonight she would play with the idea that she had lived her life at the manor and that no serious problems had ever knocked at her consciousness for solution.
A storm raged during the night and showed no sign of abatement next morning. She put on a raincoat and stout boots and went over to the deserted Boardwalk. The chain of shops looked like an abandoned village. But the waves thundered in almost to the high promenade, and she took a fierce pleasure in battling with the wind, clinging only occasionally to the rail. She felt as if she were charging an elemental enemy and chose to take it as a portent, that although she might for a moment be forced to clutch at something stronger than herself, she could neither be blown over nor forced to retreat.
That night she slept twelve hours, and when the broad sunlight awakened her, her brain was as clear as the sky and she knew that her respite was over; or would be when the day itself was over. She had decided that the night, when she would be free of interruption from even her docile servants, was the time to “have it out.”
Topper had received instructions to admit no one and to bring her no telephone messages. Eustace had promised not to return to the manor before Friday, nor attempt to communicate with her. Her isolation was complete.
After breakfast she took a long walk on the hard roads, and spent the afternoon answering an accumulation of letters from her California friends. Ann Melrose had spent the winter in New York and written home reports both astonishing and amusing; the result had been a revival of correspondence with the girl they had “given up as a bad job.”
But the hands of the clock, made for the first American Carteret, in Connecticut—a province that would seem to have been so completely occupied during the seventeenth century building historic furniture for twentieth-century collectors the wonder is it found time for the making of Puritanical history—moved relentlessly on, and at nine o’clock the house was as silent as the vault in the churchyard.
Early in the day she had brought down from the attic the gown of gold tissue she had worn the night of the party, and she went up to her bedroom and put it on. The wigs had been returned, but she powdered her hair and even put a patch on her cheek. She had a whimsical idea that in capturing the outward semblance of the old Gita Carterets she would banish the last of those inhibitions which had made her so different not only from them but from all other girls, and, with her saner knowledge of life, help her to that exact understanding of herself she had fancied she possessed in the past.
She locked the doors of the drawing-room, lit several candles, and established herself in one of the few comfortable chairs a century, singularly indifferent to comfort, had produced.
“Now!” she said aloud, “off with the lid.” And she routed a last moment of shrinking.
Nature had endowed her superlatively, and a neurosis, inevitable in a sensitive aspiring fastidious girl, had given her a rabid hatred of a sex designed, among other purposes, to complete her own. Her abhorrence of sex in all its manifestations had been, in a measure, a subtle protest against thwarted romance: an invention of the Teutonic-Nordics, to be sure, but none the less potent when rubbed in by the centuries. Nor had modernism killed it. Realists were not so much realists from reaction or conviction as from resentment at their own inability to realize it. They were in the same class with radicals who hated a society in which they were incapacitated by natural equipment to achieve success.