“In a way——” Evangeline hesitated. “She’s not like an American mother in those ways, but if you notice you’ll find that you never can stop anything happening as she wants it to. I believe she conjures. She seems to sit down by a hat and take no notice of it, and then there’s an omelet in it. If Father doesn’t want the omelet, or we don’t, she says she hasn’t made it, and I spend my life trying to find out whether she has or not.”
“Well that hasn’t much to do with what I was saying,” her sister continued. “We shall drift here if we don’t look out.”
“Drift?”
“Yes, you know—I shall arrange the flowers, and you will play endless games and go to things and perhaps ‘take up’ something, and I shall shop and be polite to visitors, and I really don’t want to do anything else. I am not energetic, and I should love to live in a cottage. But everything is so hideous here, and those smells and awful faces make me sort of drunk.”
“My dear!” Evangeline sympathised with little understanding.
“Everyone has always made me feel a little drunk,” Teresa went on. “They say such stupid things; sit there gibbering and drinking tea, and yet all the people in history—anyone—Nebuchadnezzar or Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn—were in society, and all sorts of real things happened to them; they didn’t ask for it. And I believe just as much could happen to the silly people who pay calls. I often understand eating grass and letting one’s nails grow.” She paused. “And those people who are poor—they must know a lot. I want to know what it is.”
“It is like my wanting to burst, perhaps,” said Evangeline. “Except that I don’t want to know all about those horrors. I hated all that in the war, though, of course, it was so exciting being useful that one forgot the mess. I should like to be in a dangerous country with a lovely climate, and live with a man who had read everything there is. We should ride all day, and perhaps have some children who wouldn’t want clothes or governesses nor have diseases.”
“Like a cinema,” commented Teresa.
“Yes, rather. I always get so angry with the film girl who is left in a log cabin with a perfectly beautiful savage who leaves her the room to herself out of chivalry and sleeps in the stable and does all he can for her, and then the silly ass crawls screaming round the walls, and wants to go back to some odious young man in the city.”
“But the city man would be much more likely to have read everything,” her sister pointed out. “Your savage wouldn’t know any more than you do, which isn’t saying much.”