§ 10
Joan and Peter detested each other’s friends from the beginning. The quarrel that culminated in that amazing speech of Joan’s, had been smouldering between them for a good seven years. It went right back to the days when they were still boy and girl.
To begin with, after their first separation they had had no particular friends; they had had acquaintances and habits of association, but the mind still lacks the continuity necessary for friendship and Euclid until the early teens. The first rift came with Adela Murchison. Joan brought her for the summer holidays when Peter had been just a year at Caxton.
That was the first summer at Pelham Ford. Aunt Phyllis was with them, but Aunt Phœbe was in great labour with her first and only novel, a fantasia on the theme of feminine genius, “These are my Children, or Mary on the Cross.” (It was afterwards greatly censored. Boots, the druggist librarian, would have none of it.) She stayed alone, therefore, at The Ingle-Nook, writing, revising, despairing, tearing up and beginning again, reciting her more powerful passages to the scarlet but listening ears of Groombridge and the little maid, and going more and more unkempt, unhooked, and unbuttoned. Oswald, instead of resorting to the Climax Club as he was apt to do when Aunt Phœbe was imminent, abode happily in his new home.
Adela was a month or so older than Peter and, what annoyed him to begin with, rather more fully grown. She was, as she only too manifestly perceived, a woman of the world in comparison with both of her hosts. She was still deeply in love with Joan, but by no means indifferent to this dark boy who looked at her with so much of Joan’s cool detachment.
Joan’s romantic dreams were Joan’s inmost secret, Adela’s romantic intentions were an efflorescence. She was already hoisting the signals for masculine surrender. She never failed to have a blue ribbon astray somewhere to mark and help the blueness of her large blue eyes. She insisted upon the flaxen waves over her ears, and secretly assisted them to kink. She had a high colour. She had no rouge yet in her possession but there was rouge in her soul, and she would rub her cheeks with her hands before she came into a room. She discovered to Joan the incredible fact that Oswald was also a man.
With her arm round Joan’s waist or over her shoulder she would look back at him across the lawn.
“I say,” she said, “he’d be frightfully good-looking—if it wasn’t for that.”
And one day, “I wonder if Mr. Sydenham’s ever been in love.”
She lay in wait for Oswald’s eye. She went after him to ask him unimportant things.