There was a pause. "I'm not as young as you are, dearest."
Elizabeth, sitting beside Mrs. Ogden, smiled bitterly in the dark. "Wait a while," she said to herself. "Wait a while!" Her own emotions surprised her, she was conscious of a feeling of acute anger. As if by a simultaneous impulse the two women suddenly drew as far apart as the narrow confines of the cab permitted. To Elizabeth it seemed as if something so intense as to be almost tangible leapt out between them—a naked sword.
Sitting with her back to the driver, Joan was lost in thought; she was thinking of the utter hopelessness of making her mother really happy. But with another part of her mind she was pondering Richard's sudden outburst in the library. She liked him, she thought what a satisfactory brother he would be. Why was he so afraid of being caught and bottled? Lawrence, she felt, must be bottled already; he liked it, she was sure that Lawrence would think it the right thing to be. She wondered how Richard would manage to escape—if he did escape. A picture of him rose before her eyes; he made her laugh, he was so emphatic. She resolved to talk him over with Elizabeth. Of course it was all nonsense—still, he seemed dreadfully afraid. What was it really that he was afraid of, and why was he so afraid for her?
The cab jolted abruptly, Joan's thoughts jolting with it. The driver had pulled up to drop Elizabeth at her brother's house.
[BOOK II]
CHAPTER TEN
1
THE summer in which Joan's fifteenth birthday occurred was particularly anxious and depressing because of Colonel Ogden's health.
One morning in July he had woken up with a headache and a cough; bronchitis followed, and the strain on his already flagging heart made the doctor uneasy. Undoubtedly Colonel Ogden was very ill. Joan, working hard for her Junior Local, was put to it to know what to do; whether to throw up the examination for the sake of helping her mother or to continue to cram for the sake of not disappointing Elizabeth. In the end the doctor solved this difficulty by sending in an experienced nurse.
Just about this time a deep depression settled on Joan, a kind of heavy melancholy. She wondered what the origin of this might be; she was too honest to pretend to herself that it was caused by anxiety about her father. She wanted to grieve over him. She thought: "Poor thing, he can't breathe; he's lying in a kind of lump of pillows upstairs in bed; his face looks dreadfully ugly and he can't help it." But the picture that she drew left her cold. Then a hundred little repulsive details of the illness crowded in on her imagination; when she was with her father she would watch for them with apprehension. She forced herself to show him an exaggerated tenderness, which he, poor man, did not want; it was Milly he was always asking for—but Milly was frightened of illness.