Anne had not once moved from her original place by the table in the course of that long conversation of ours, and she still stood there, her finger-tips resting on the oak with a powerful effect of poise when Brenda came into the room.
Brenda’s actions were far more vivacious than her friend’s. She came in with an air of youthful exuberance, looked at me with a shade of inquiry, and then sat down opposite Anne.
“I came back over the hill and through the wood,” she said, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. “It’s a topping evening. Poor Arthur; I wish I could have gone with him. I offered to, but he didn’t want me to come. I’m not sure he didn’t think they might kidnap me if I went too near.” She turned to me with a bright smile as she added, “Could they keep me, Mr. Melhuish; shut me up or something?”
“I’m not quite sure about that,” I said, “but they could arrest—Arthur”—(I could not call him anything else, I found)—“if he ran away with you. On a charge of abduction, you know.”
“They could make it pretty nasty for us all round, in fact,” Brenda concluded.
“I’m afraid they could,” I agreed.
She was looking extraordinarily pretty. The bizarre contrast between her dark eyelashes and her fair hair seemed to find some kind of echo in the combination of health and fragility that she expressed in her movements. She appeared at once vital and delicate without being too highly-strung. I could well understand how the bucolic strain in Arthur Banks was prostrate with admiration before such a rare and exciting beauty.
By the side of Brenda, Anne looked physically robust. The developed lines of her figure emphasised Brenda’s fragility. And yet Anne’s eyes, her whole pose, expressed a spirituality that Brenda lacked. Anne, with her amazing changes of mood, her rapid response to emotion, gave expression to some spirit not less feminine than Brenda’s, but infinitely deeper. Behind the moving shadows and sunlight of her impulses there lay always some reminder of a constant orientation. She might trifle brilliantly with the surface of life, but her soul was more steadfast than a star. Brenda might love passionately, but her love would be relatively personal, selfish. When Anne gave herself, she would love like a mother, with her whole being.
I came out of my day-dream to find that she was speaking of me.