Concha blushed. An unexpected trait in Concha was an inordinate vanity—the idea that any one, child, dog, boring old woman, could possibly dislike her was too humiliating to be admitted—and though one part of her was fully aware that she irritated, nay, jarred æsthetically upon Teresa, the other part of her obstinately, angrily, denied it.
“I don’t care if she does ... besides she doesn’t ... really,” she said hotly.
She then chose a cigarette, placed it in a very long amber holder, lit it, and began to smoke it with an air of intense sensuous enjoyment. Concha was still half playing at being grown up, and one of the things about her that irritated Teresa was that she was apt to walk and talk, to pour out tea, and smoke cigarettes, like an English actress in a drawing-room play, never quite losing her “stagyness.”
“Do you know where the shoe pinches?” asked Arnold. “It’s that you are six years younger than she is; if it were less or more it would be all right—but six years is jolly hard to forgive. You see, Teresa is still nominally a girl. By Jove!” and he gave a short, scornful laugh, “there she is, probably telling herself that you get on her nerves because you’re frivolous, and like rag-time, and all the rest of it, while all the time she, the immaculate, is just suffering from suppressed sex, like any other spinster.”
This explanation definitely jarred on Concha: she, too, suspected Teresa of being jealous of her, but deep down she hoped that this jealousy was based on something less fortuitous and more flattering to herself than six years’ juniority; nor did she like being thought of as a mere frivolous “fox-trotter.” She had the tremendous pride of generation of the post-War adolescent; she and her friends she felt as a brilliant, insolent triumphant sodality, free, wise, invincible, who, having tasted of the fruit of the seven symbolic trees of Paradise, and having found their flavour insipid, had chosen, with their bold, rather weary eyes wide open, to expend their magnificent talents on fox-trots, revues, and dalliance, to turn life and its treacherous possibilities into a Platonic kermis—oh, it was maddening of Teresa not to see this, to persist in thinking of them as frivolous, commonplace, rather vulgar young mediocrities! She should just hear some of the midnight talks between Concha and her friend, Elfrida Penn ... the passion, the satire, the profundity!
As a matter of fact, these talks were mainly of young men, chiffons, the doings of their other schoolfellows, what their head mistress had said to them on such and such an occasion at school, with an occasional interjection of, “Oh, it’s all beastly!” or a wondering whether twenty years hence they would be very dull and stout, and whether they would still be friends.
But midnight talks are apt to acquire in retrospect a great profundity and significance.
Also, the crudeness of Arnold’s words—“suppressed sex, like any other spinster”—shocked her in spite of herself. Her old, child’s veneration for Teresa lived on side by side with her new conviction that she was passée, out-of-date, pre-War, and it made her wince that she should be explained by nasty, Freudian theories.
“Oh, Lord! I’m sick of it all!” she cried with exaggerated vehemence.