“Dick! How—dare—you?” and having first frozen him with her stare, she got up and left the room.
Dick turned to Teresa: “For heaven’s sake,” he said, “do make your mother see that Protestants are Christians too, that they aren’t all blackguards.”
“It would be no good—that’s really got nothing to do with it,” said Teresa wearily.
“Nothing to do with it? Oh, well—you’re all too deep for me. Anyhow, it’s all a most awful storm in a teacup, and the thing that really makes her so angry is that she knows perfectly well she can do nothing to prevent it. Well, do go up to her now.... I daren’t show my face within a mile ... get her some eau-de-Cologne or something. ’Snice! ’Snice, old man! Come along then, and look at the crocuses,” and, followed by ’Snice, he went through the French window into the garden.
Yes; her father had been partly right—a very bitter element in it all was that the passionate dominant Doña could do nothing to prevent the creatures of her body from managing their lives in their own way. What help was it that behind her stood the convictions of the multitudinous dead, the “bishops, priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors, porters, confessors, virgins, widows, and all the holy people of God?” She and they were powerless to arrest the incoming tide of life; she had identified herself with the dead—with what was old, crazy, and impotent, and, therefore, she was pre-doomed to failure.
Teresa had a sudden vision of the sinful couch (according to the Doña’s views) of Concha and Rory, infested by the dead: “I say, Concha, what a frightful bore! They ought to have given us a mosquito-net.” “Oh Lord! Well, never mind—I’m simply dropping with sleep.” And so to bed, comfortably mattressed by the shrouds of the “holy people of God.”
She went up and tried the Doña’s door, but found it locked. She felt that she ought next to go to Concha, upon whom, she told herself, all this was very hard—that she, who had merely set out upon the flowery path that had been made by the feet of myriads and myriads of other sane and happy people since the world began, should have her joy dimmed, her laughter arrested, by ghosts and other peoples’ delusions. But, though she told herself this, she could not feel any real pity; her heart was as cold as ice.
However, she went to Concha’s room, and found her sitting at her desk writing a letter—probably a long angry one to that other suffering sage, Elfrida Penn.
“Poor old Concha!” she said, “I’m sorry it should be like this for you.”
Concha—puffed up with the sense of being a symbol of a whole generation—scowled angrily: “Oh, it’s all too fantastic! Thank the Lord I’ll soon be out of all this!”