"Oh, yes, I do understand; I understand only too well, Joan. You're twenty-three already, and we're no nearer Cambridge than we were; what I want to know is how long is this going on?"
Joan was silent.
"Oh, my dear!" said Elizabeth, stretching out her hand. "Won't you come now?"
Joan shook her head. "I can't, I can't."
A coldness grew up between them, a coldness unrelieved now by even so much as bad temper. They met less often and hardly ever worked together. At times they tried to avoid each other, so painful was this estrangement to them both. The lines deepened on Elizabeth's face and her mouth grew hard. She darned Ralph's socks with a shrinking dislike of the texture and feel of them, and ordered his meals with a sickening distaste for food. She felt that the daily round of life was growing more and more unendurable. Breakfast was the worst ordeal, heralding as it did the advent of another useless day. Ralph liked eggs and bacon, which he would have repeated ad nauseam. She could remember the time when she had shared this liking, but now the smell of the frying bacon disgusted her. Ralph did not always trouble to eat quite tidily, and he chewed with a slightly open mouth; when he wiped his lips he invariably left yellow egg-stains on his napkin. She began to watch for those stains and to listen for his noisy chewing. His face got on her nerves, too; it was growing daily more like Uncle John's, and not young Uncle John's either—old Uncle John's. His eyes were acquiring the "Don't hurt me" look of the portrait in the study. Something in the way his legs moved lately suggested approaching old age, and yet he was not so old; it must be Seabourne.
"Oh, do let's get away from here!" she burst out one morning. "Let's go to America, Australia, the Antipodes, anywhere!"
Ralph dropped his paper to stare at her, and then he laughed. He thought she was trying to be funny.
3
At Leaside things were little better. A dreariness more tangible than usual pervaded the house. Milly alternated between moods of exuberant hopefulness and fits of deep depression, when she would cling to Joan like a sickly child. "Don't leave me! Oh, Joan, you mustn't leave me," was her almost daily entreaty. She was difficult to manage, and insisted on practising in spite of all they could say; but these bursts of defiance generally ended in tears, for after a short half hour or so the music would begin to go tragically wrong, as her weak hand faltered on the bow.
"Oh!" she sobbed miserably, whenever this happened; "it's all gone; I shall never, never play again. I wish I were dead!"