Molly would lie on a sofa, in a gorgeous kind of déshabille which cost almost as much as Miss Carew spent on her clothes in the whole year, and apparently take delight in scaring her by these hideous revelations. She was so strange in her wild kind of eloquence, and it was so impossible to believe all she said, that the doubt more than once occurred to Miss Carew whether it might be a case of the use of drugs. The extraordinary personal indulgence of luxury was unlike anything the older woman had ever come across. Then there was no system, nothing business-like about Molly as there often is in women of the modern world. Miss Carew dimly suspected that any society of human beings expects some self-discipline, and some sacrifice to ordinary rules. As it was she wondered how long Molly's neglect of small duties and her frequent insolence would be condoned.
All this, which had been coming on gradually, was positively nauseous to the middle-aged Englishwoman whose nerves were suffering from the strain, and she came to feel that it would be impossible to endure it much longer. It would be easier to drudge and trudge with girls in the schoolroom for a smaller salary than to endure life with Molly if she were to develop further this kind of temper.
For months now Miss Carew had lived under a great strain. From the evening when she had found Molly sitting on the floor with the tin box open before her, and old, yellow letters lying on the ground about it, she had been almost constantly uneasy. She could not forget the sight of Molly crouching like a tramp in the midst of the warm, comfortable room, biting her right hand in a horrible physical convulsion. It was of no use to try to think that Molly's condition that night was entirely the result of illness, or that the loss of her unknown mother had upset her to that degree or at all in that way. The character of Molly's mental state was quite, quite different from the qualities that come of grief or sickness. Then had followed the very anxious nursing, during which all other thoughts had been swallowed up in immediate anxiety and responsibility.
During Molly's convalescence, in the quiet days by the sea-side, Miss Carew began to reflect on a kind of coherent unity in the delirious talk she had listened to during the worst days of the illness. And she also noticed that Molly, by furtive little jokes and sudden, irrelevant questions, was trying to find out what Miss Carew had heard her say. Then it became evident that Molly attributed all the excitement of that night to her subsequent illness—only once, and that very calmly, alluding to the fact of her mother's death.
Miss Carew had no wish to penetrate the mystery of the black box and the faded letters. She had a sort of instinctive horror of the subject, but she could not but watch the fate of the box when they came back to the flat. Molly paid no attention to it whatever, and said in a natural tone:
"I shall send my father's dispatch box and sword-case and my own dispatch boxes in a cab. Would you mind taking them and having them put in the little room next to my bed-room?"
But in the end Molly had taken them herself, as she thought Miss Carew had a slight cold. Miss Carew always had a certain dislike to the door of the little room next to Molly's, which had evidently been once used for a powder closet. She did not even know if the door were locked or not, and she never touched the handle. She had an uncanny horror of passing the door, at least so she said afterwards; probably in retrospect she came to exaggerate her feelings as to these things.
She was puzzled and confused: her health was not good, and her faculties were dimmed. It was probably the strain of living with Molly whom she could no longer control or guide, and who was so evidently in dire need of some one to do both. She felt dreadfully burdened with responsibility, both as to the things she did understand and the things she did not understand. What she could not understand was a sense of moral darkness, like a great, looming grey cloud, sometimes simply dark and heavy, and at other times a cloud electric with coming danger. She felt as if burdened with a secret which she longed to impart, only that she did not know what it was. At times it was as if she carried some monstrous thing on her back, whilst she could only see its dark, shapeless shadow. Her self-confidence was going, and her culture was so useless. What good was it to her now to know really well the writings of Burke, or Macaulay—nay, of Racine and Pascal? She had never been religious since her childhood, but in these long, solitary days in the great house that grew more and more gloomy as she passed about it when Molly was out, she began to feel new needs and to seek for old helps.
Molly was sometimes struck by the change in her companion. Miss Carew seemed to have grown so futile, so incoherent and funny, unlike the Miss Carew who had been her finishing governess not many years ago.
The sight of Carey's troubled, mottled face began to irritate Molly to an unbearable degree.