"Trust you? Of course I trust you. Joan, I don't think you know how I feel about all this; it's too much, almost. I feel—oh, well, I can't explain, only it's desperately serious to me."
"And what do you think it is to me?" demanded Joan passionately. "It's more than serious to me!"
"Joan, you've known me for years now. I was your teacher when you were quite little. I used to think you looked like a young colt then, I remember—never mind that—only you've known me too long really to know me; that can happen I think. I often wish I could get inside you and know just how I look to you, what sort of woman I am as you see me, because I don't believe it's the real me. I believe you see your old teacher, and later on your very good and devoted friend. Well, that's all right so far as it goes; that's part of me, but only a part. There's another big bit that's quite different; you saw the edge of it when I left you to go to London. It's not neat and calm and self-possessed at all, and above all it's outrageously discontented and adventurous; it longs for all sorts of things and hates being crossed. This part of me loves life, real life, and beautiful things and brilliant, careless people. It feels young, absurdly so for its age, and it demands the pleasures of youth, cries out for them. I think it cries out all the more because it's been so long denied. This me could be reckless of consequences, greedy of happiness and jealous of competition. It is jealous already of you, Joan, of any interests that seem to take your attention off me, of any affection that might rob me of even a hair's-breadth of you. It wants to keep you all to itself, to have all your love and gratitude, all that makes you; and it wouldn't be contented with less. Well, my dear, this side of me and the side that you know are one and indivisible, they're the two halves of the whole that is Elizabeth Rodney; what do you think of her? Aren't you a little afraid after this revelation?"
Joan laughed quietly. "No," she said, "I'm not a bit afraid. Because, you see, I think I've known the real Elizabeth for a long time now."
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
1
THE tiny study at Alexandra House was bright with flowers, although it was November. The flowers had been the gift of one of Harriet Nelson's youthful admirers, Rosie Wilmot, an art student. The room was littered with a mass of futilities, including torn music and innumerable signed photographs. The guilty smell of cigarette smoke hung on the air, although the window had been opened.
Harriet, plump and pretty, with her red hair and blue eyes, lolled ungracefully in the wicker arm-chair; her thick ankles stretched out in front of her. On a low stool, sufficiently near these same ankles to express humbleness of spirit, crouched Rosie Wilmot.
"Chérie," Harriet was saying with an exaggerated Parisian accent, "you are a naughty child to spend your money on flowers for me!"
"But, darling, you know how I loved buying them!"