“Put this away. No, I don’t want anything more at present.”
Tea came in as she spoke.
Afterwards in her own room Jane sat down on the broad window ledge with her hands in her lap, looking out over the sea. The lovely day was drawing slowly to a lovelier close, the sun-drenched air absolutely still, absolutely clear. The tide was low, the sea one sheet of unbroken blue, except where the black rocks, more visible than Jane had ever seen them, pierced the surface.
Jane did not quite know what had happened to her. Her moment of exhilaration was gone. She was not afraid, but she felt a sense of horror which she had not known before. She had thought of this adventure as her adventure, her own risk. Somehow she had never really related it to other people. For the first time, she began to see Formula “A,” not as something which threatened her, but as something that menaced the world. It was ridiculous that it was Mrs. Cottingham and Daphne Todhunter who had caused this change.
It is one thing to think vaguely of civilisation being swept away, and quite another to visualise some concrete, humdrum Tom, Dick, or Harry being swept horribly out of existence. Jane’s imagination suddenly showed her Formula “A”—The Process, whatever they chose to call the horrible thing—in operation; showed it annihilating fussy Mrs. Cottingham, with her overcrowded drawing-room and her overcrowded talk; showed it doing something horrible to fat, common Daphne Todhunter. The romance of adventure fell away, the glamour that sometimes surrounds catastrophe shrivelled and was gone. It was horrible, only horrible.
Jane kept seeing Mrs. Cottingham’s ugly room, and Raymond Heritage standing there, as she had seen her that afternoon, like a statue that had nothing to do with its surroundings. All at once she knew what it was that Lady Heritage reminded her of—not Mercury at all, but Medusa with the lovely, tortured face, stone and yet suffering.
As she looked out over that calm sea she had before her all the time the vision of Medusa, and of hundreds and hundreds of quite ordinary, vulgar, commonplace Mrs. Cottinghams and Daphne Todhunters being turned to stone. A tremor began to shake her. It kept coming again and again. Then, all at once, the tears were running down her face. It was then it came to her that she could not bear to think of Daphne as she had seen her at the last, with that hurt, angry, puzzled look.
“She’s a fat lump, but Arnold is her brother, and Renata is her friend, and she thinks they’ve failed each other and been horrid to her. I can’t bear it.”
At that moment Jane hated herself fiercely because Daphne’s tears had amused her.
“You’ve got a brick instead of a heart, and, if you get eliminated, it’ll serve you right.”