“All quite possible, but the earth won’t spin the other way when that happens.... No! ho! I’d give something to see Dick “go wooing with the boys.” Don’t worry about it. These things be with Allah, and we can only look on. Get the chessmen.”
The red-haired girl was lying down in her own room, staring at the ceiling. The footsteps of people on the pavement sounded, as they grew indistinct in the distance, like a many-times-repeated kiss that was all one long kiss. Her hands were by her side, and they opened and shut savagely from time to time.
The charwoman in charge of the scrubbing of the studio knocked at her door: “Beg y’ pardon, miss, but in cleanin’ of a floor there’s two, not to say three, kind of soap, which is yaller, an’ mottled, an’ disinfectink.
Now, jist before I took my pail into the passage I though it would be pre’aps jest as well if I was to come up ’ere an’ ask you what sort of soap you was wishful that I should use on them boards. The yaller soap, miss——”
There was nothing in the speech to have caused the paroxysm of fury that drove the red-haired girl into the middle of the room, almost shouting—
“Do you suppose I care what you use? Any kind will do!—any kind!”
The woman fled, and the red-haired girl looked at her own reflection in the glass for an instant and covered her face with her hands. It was as though she had shouted some shameless secret aloud.
CHAPTER VII
Roses red and roses white
Plucked I for my love’s delight.
She would none of all my posies,—
Bade me gather her blue roses.
Half the world I wandered through,
Seeking where such flowers grew;
Half the world unto my quest
Answered but with laugh and jest.
It may be beyond the grave
She shall find what she would have.
Mine was but an idle quest,—
Roses white and red are best!—Blue Roses.
The sea had not changed. Its waters were low on the mud-banks, and the Marazion Bell-buoy clanked and swung in the tide-way. On the white beach-sand dried stumps of sea-poppy shivered and chattered.