The Trinity. A three-cornered note.
"My dear Miss Lambert: I am very sorry; but it really isn't any good, and if it was it couldn't be done in the time. You wouldn't like it if I told you lies, would you? That's why I can't join in the prayers and say the Creed and bow; in Church or anywhere. Rose made me promise not to talk about it, and I won't.
"If you must send me away to-morrow morning, you must. But I'm glad you love me. I was afraid you didn't.
"With love, your very affectionate
"Mary Olivier."
"P.S.—I've folded my clothes all ready for packing."
To-morrow the clothes were put back again in their drawers. She wasn't going. Miss Lambert said something about Rose and Lucy and "kindness to poor Clara."
VI.
Rose Godwin told her that home-sickness wore off. It didn't. It came beating up and up, like madness, out of nothing. The French verbs, grey, slender as little verses on the page, the French verbs swam together and sank under the clear-floating images of home-sickness. Mamma's face, Roddy's, Dan's face. Tall trees, the Essex fields, flat as water, falling away behind them. Little feathery trees, flying low on the sky-line. Outside the hallucination the soiled light shut you in.
The soiled light; odours from the warm roots of girl's hair; and Sunday. Sunday; stale odours of churches. You wrote out the sermon you had not listened to and had not heard. Somebody told you the text, and you amused yourself by seeing how near you could get to what you would have heard if you had listened. After tea, hymns; then church again. Your heart laboured with the strain of kneeling, arms lifted up to the high pew ledge. You breathed pew dust. Your brain swayed like a bladder, brittle, swollen with hot gas-fumes. After supper, prayers again. Sunday was over.