“But before he gets used to it, that is the bad time. And then it is all so confusing——”
Hadria sat on the low parapet of the terrace at the Priory. Valeria had a place on the topmost step, where the sun had been beating all the morning. Hadria had taken off her hat to enjoy the warmth. The long sprays of the roses were blown across her now and then. Once, a thorn had left a mark of blood upon her hand.
Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.
“I don’t want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don’t want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the accumulation of emotion—emotion that has never had a good explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no one shouts or says ‘damn.’”
“Ah! you naturally feel out of your element.”
Hadria laughed. “It’s all very well to take that superior tone. You don’t reside on an ordnance map.”
There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought.
“It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance of the travail of life. How do these women stand it?”
Valeria presently woke up, and admitted that to live in an English village would drive her out of her mind in a week. “And yet, Valeria, you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a place in life—as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same thing!”
“It is well that you do not mean all you say.”