‘Can you live independently, satisfied with your interests and occupations?’ she demanded at last. ‘Yes, I know you can. I can’t. I must exist more than half in other people. It is what they think and feel that matters to me, just as much as what I think and feel. The best of life is in that communication.’
‘It has always been a passion with you, Judy,’ I replied. ‘I can imagine how much you must miss—’
‘Whom?’
‘Anna Chichele,’ I said softly.
She got up and walked about the room, fixing here and there an intent regard upon things which she did not see. ‘Oh, I do,’ she said at one point, with the effect of pulling herself together. She took another turn or two, and then finding herself near the door she went out. I felt as profoundly humiliated for her as if she had staggered.
The next night was one of those that stand out so vividly, for no reason that one can identify, in one’s memory. We were dining with the Harbottles, a small party, for a tourist they had with them. Judy and I and Somers and the traveller had drifted out into the veranda, where the scent of Japanese lilies came and went on the spring wind to trouble the souls of any taken unawares. There was a brightness beyond the foothills where the moon was coming, and I remember how one tall clump swayed out against it, and seemed in passionate perfume to lay a burden on the breast. Judy moved away from it and sat clasping her knees on the edge of the veranda. Somers, when his eyes were not upon her, looked always at the lily.
Even the spirit of the globe-trotter was stirred, and he said, ‘I think you Anglo-Indians live in a kind of little paradise.’
There was an instant’s silence, and then Judy turned her face into the lamplight from the drawing-room. ‘With everything but the essentials,’ she said.
We stayed late; Mr. Chichele and ourselves were the last to go. Judy walked with us along the moonlit drive to the gate, which is so unnecessary a luxury in India that the servants always leave it open. She swung the stiff halves together.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘it is shut.’