At the end of supper she felt quite tired, what with saying one thing with her tongue and another in her heart. Sometimes she felt that she must say something to break down this unreality, which was between them like a wall of ice—at other times she felt angry, and it was Ellen she wanted to break down, to force out of her superior refuge, and show up to her own self as just a common sinner receiving common forgiveness. But there was something about Ellen which made this impossible—something about her manner, with its cold poise, something about her face, which had indefinitely changed—it looked paler, wider, and there were secrets at the corners of her mouth.
This was not the first time that Joanna had seen her sister calm and collected while she herself was flustered—but this evening a sense of her own awkwardness helped to put her at a still greater disadvantage. She found herself making inane remarks, hesitating and stuttering—she grew sulky and silent, and at last suggested that Ellen would like to go to bed.
Her sister seemed glad enough, and they went upstairs together. But even the sight of her old bedroom, where the last year of her maidenhood had been spent, even the sight of the new curtains chastening its exuberance with their dim austerity, did not dissolve Ellen's terrible, cold sparkle—her frozen fire.
"Good night," said Joanna.
"Good night," said Ellen, "may I have some hot water?"
"I'll tell the gal," said Joanna tamely, and went out.
§32
When she was alone in her own room, she seemed to come to herself. She felt ashamed of having been so baffled by Ellen, of having received her on those terms. She could not bear to think of Ellen living on in the house, so terribly at an advantage. If she let things stay as they were, she was tacitly acknowledging some indefinite superiority which her sister had won through sin. All the time she was saying nothing she felt that Ellen was saying in her heart—"I have been away to foreign parts, I have been loved by a man I don't belong to, I have Seen Life, I have stopped at hotels, I have met people of a kind you haven't even spoken to...." That was what Ellen was saying, instead of what Joanna thought she ought to say, which was—"I'm no better then a dairy girl in trouble, than Martha Tilden whom you sacked when I was a youngster, and it's unaccountable good of you to have me home."
Joanna was not the kind to waste her emotions in the sphere of thought. She burst out of the room, and nearly knocked over Mene Tekel, who was on her way to Ellen with a jug of hot water.
"Give that to me," she said, and went to her sister's door, at which she was still sufficiently demoralized to knock.