"Don't say you want to leave, Ethel?" Joan implored with a note of despair in her voice.
"But I do! She's never satisfied, miss; she's at me all the time."
"She's at me, too," thought Joan, "and yet I don't seem able to give a month's notice."
4
It was summer again. How monotonously the seasons came round; it was always spring, summer, autumn, or winter; it could never be anything else, that made a year. How many years made a lifetime?
Joan began playing tennis again; one always played tennis every summer at Seabourne, but now she disliked the game. Since Milly's affair with Mr. Thompson the tennis club and its members had become intolerable to her. The members found her dull and probably disliked her; she was so sure of this that she grew self-conscious and abashed in their midst. She wondered sometimes if that was why she found fault with them, because they made her feel shy. She had never made friends, she had been too much wrapped up in Elizabeth. No one was interested in her, no one wanted her. Richard wrote angry letters; she never answered them, but he went on writing just the same. He seemed to take a pleasure in bullying her.
"I shan't come home this summer," he wrote. "I can't see you withering on your stalk. You can marry me if you like; why not, since nothing better offers? But what's the good of talking to you? It's hopeless! I don't know why I waste time in writing; I suppose it's because I'm in love with you. You've disappointed me horribly; I could have stood aside for your work, but you don't want to work, and you make your duty to your mother the excuse. Oh, Joan! I did think you were made of better stuff. I thought you were a real person and not just a bit of flabby toast like the rest of the things at Seabourne."
She had said that she cared less than nothing for his approval or disapproval, but she found she did care after all; not because she loved Richard, but because it was being brought home to her that she, like the rest of mankind, needed approbation. No one approved of her, not even the mother for whose sake she was sacrificing herself. Self-sacrifice was unpopular, it seemed, or was it in some way her own fault? She must be different from other people, a kind of unprepossessing freak. She sat brooding over this at the school-room table, with Richard's last epistle crushed in her hand. Her eyes were bent unseeing on the ink-stained mahogany, but something, perhaps it was a faint sound, made her look up. Elizabeth was standing in the doorway gazing at her.
Joan sprang forward with a cry.
"Hallo, Joan," said Elizabeth calmly, and sat down in the arm-chair.