For a moment Miss Towers turned pink, then she laughed. She was plump and personable; her new way of doing her hair had taken ten years off her age and if her high lace collar was rather tight and did cut her a little under her second chin, well, we all have our troubles, and there are worse ones than plumpness. She straightened her wisteria-coloured satin blouse so that the waist above the tailor-made fawn skirt looked its smallest, and tilted her laughing head back so that it seemed to rock on the two points of her collar-whalebones as if they had been gimballs.
“My dear,” she broke out, “don’t be so absurdly solemn! Try to enjoy yourself; you’ll never be younger than you are now! And I do wish you wouldn’t go about in those sad art-colours always. You look like a sparrow having a dust-bath. They may be all right for pictures, but it isn’t as if you sat in a frame all day. Good gracious, anybody’d think you were eighty to see you sometimes! Laugh and the world laughs with you, my dear. Come inside, and don’t be silly; we’re going to have great fun.”
But again Amory turned away.
More than once she had had a wild wonder whether that trip to Paris had not had something to do with her aunt’s preposterous rejuvenescence; but no, it was hardly possible that while she herself had wandered in the museums Aunt Jerry had given herself to secret and wicked pleasures. No, it was the boarding-house and the young musical society again. That clever advertisement had really made Aunt Jerry think that she was young.... It did not occur to Amory that perhaps these ancient ones, of forty or fifty or more, had earned a rest. It did not occur to her that life might have bruised and scarred them, and that they laughed a little loudly and stridently for fear of worse, and that there was hardly one of them whose eyes had not rested on sadder and more sordid and tragic scenes than her own had ever seen. She saw them, as it were, in the flat, as a mere human pattern, and when she was bored with it, Glenerne was a thing to be shut up like one of its own photograph albums. Their manners offended her, and she inquired no further.... In the meantime, however, flirtatious little Mrs. Deschamps would sit in a corner with anybody, and her aunt entered into an engagement at an age when she really might have been expected to be thinking of serious things, and the whatnot in the corner, with its photographs of Glenerne’s grandchildren, was a source of mirth that seemed never to run dry, and if Amory must be misunderstood, well, it was better to be misunderstood than to be understood by these terrible people.
Amory went to her room and took down a volume of Pater.
But she had hardly opened the book when there came a tap at her door, and, in response to her “Come in,” her aunt’s middle-aged fiancé entered.
Dorothy Lennard had called Mr. Massey the safety-valve because he always seemed to use three times as many “s’s” in his conversation as anybody else. These escaped over a neat little row of very white lower teeth like those of a bulldog. The dark hair that grew up the sides of his head always reminded Amory of the elastics of an old pair of boots, and his cropped dark moustache did not interfere with his perpetual gentle hissing. He wore gold glasses and a closely-buttoned frock-coat; he was an educational bookseller in St. Mark’s Road; and it had now been known for some hours in the boarding-house that he, a man of some substance, had been moved to come to Glenerne first of all by the sight of Miss Geraldine Towers shaking the crumb-tray out of the window to feed the birds.
“My dear Amory,” said Mr. Massey, “Geraldine has asked me to come and see whether you won’t join the rest of us in our little celebration. I need not say that it would be pleasant if you would assist.”
Without (she thought) too open an appearance of resignation, Amory closed her book again. She supposed she must.... “All right, if you like,” she said, without fervour.
“Thank you,” said Mr. Massey gratefully. “I was sure you would not absent yourself.—And since I am here, I wonder whether I might say a word for which occasion has not hitherto presented itself?”