"Come on! Come on!" said Poppy from the door.
He drew wistfully away from them. "I do hope you both come to Jesus," he murmured, and smiled sweetly over his shoulder. "Yes, Poppy, I'm quite ready. Why, you aren't cross with me over anything, are you, dear? Well, good-bye, mother."
"Good-bye, Roger. And we'll come to the meeting. I'll let you out myself, my dears."
Very pleased that she and Richard were at last alone together, Ellen sat down on one of the armchairs at the hearth and smiled up at him. But he would not come to her. He smiled back through the closed visor of an overmastering preoccupation, and moved past her to the fireplace and stood with his elbow on one end of the mantelpiece, listening to the sounds that came in from the parlour through the half-open door: Marion's urbane voice, thin and smooth like a stretched membrane, the click of the front-door handle, the last mounting squeal from Roger, which was cut short by a gruff whine from Poppy, and, loudest of all, the silence that fell after the banging of the door. They heard the turn of the electric switch. Marion must be standing out there in the dark. But Ellen doubted that even if he had been with her in soul as in body, and had spoken to her the words she wished, she could have answered him as she ought, for a part of her soul too was standing out there in the dark with Marion. They were both of them tainted with disloyalty to their own lives.
When Marion came in she halted at the door and turned out all the lamps save the candlesticks on the table. She passed through the amber, fire-shot twilight and sat down in the other armchair, and began to polish her nails on the palm of her hands. They were all of them lapped in dusk, veiled with it, featureless because of it. Behind them the candlesticks cast a brilliant light on the disordered table, on the four chairs where Richard and Marion, Roger and Poppy had sat. Ellen's chair had been pushed back against the wall when she rose; one would not have known that Ellen had been sitting there too.
Marion kept looking back at the illuminated table as if it were a symbol of the situation that made them sit in the twilight without words. Suddenly she made a sound of distress. "Oh dear! Look at the cakes that have been left! Ellen, you can't have had anything to eat."
"I've just had too good a tea," said Ellen, using the classic Edinburgh formula.
"But you must have an éclair or a cream bun. I got them for you. I used to love them when I was your age." She rose and began to move round the table, bending over the cake-plates. Ellen was reminded of the way that her own mother used to hover above the debris of the little tea-parties they sometimes gave in Hume Park Square, cheeping: "I think they enjoyed their teas. Do you not think so, Ellen?" and satisfying an appetite which she had been too solicitous and interested a hostess to more than whet in the presence of her friends. That was how a mother ought to be, little, sweet, and moderate.
Marion brought her an éclair on a plate. She took it and stood up, asking meekly: "Shall I take it and eat it somewhere else? You and Richard'll be wanting to talk things over."
"Ah, no!" Marion was startled; and Ellen, to her own distress, found herself exulting because this mature woman, who had dived so deeply into the tides of adult experience in which she herself had hardly been laved, was facing the situation so inadequately. She scorned her for the stiffness of the conciliatory gesture she attempted, for the queer notes which her voice made when she tried to alter it from her customary tone of indifference in saying: "But, Ellen dear, you're one of us now. We've no affairs that aren't yours too. We only wish they were a little gayer...." She admired the facility of her own response for not more than a minute, for, giving her a kind, blindish smile, Marion walked draggingly across the hearthrug and took up her position at the disengaged side of the fireplace and rested her elbow on the mantelpiece, even as Richard was doing at its other end. They stood side by side, without speaking, their firelit faces glowing darkly like rubies in shadow, their eyes set on the brilliantly lit tea-table and its four chairs. They looked beautiful and unconquerable—this tall man who could assail all things with his outstretched strength, this broad-bodied woman whom nothing could assail because of her crouching strength.