“Not at all; I call it the reverse of odd,” Miss Allan replied. “I always consider myself the most ordinary person I know. It’s rather distinguished to be as ordinary as I am. I forget—are you a prodigy, or did you say you were not a prodigy?”
She smiled at Rachel very kindly. She seemed to have known and experienced so much, as she moved cumbrously about the room, that surely there must be balm for all anguish in her words, could one induce her to have recourse to them. But Miss Allan, who was now locking the cupboard door, showed no signs of breaking the reticence which had snowed her under for years. An uncomfortable sensation kept Rachel silent; on the one hand, she wished to whirl high and strike a spark out of the cool pink flesh; on the other she perceived there was nothing to be done but to drift past each other in silence.
“I’m not a prodigy. I find it very difficult to say what I mean—” she observed at length.
“It’s a matter of temperament, I believe,” Miss Allan helped her. “There are some people who have no difficulty; for myself I find there are a great many things I simply cannot say. But then I consider myself very slow. One of my colleagues now, knows whether she likes you or not—let me see, how does she do it?—by the way you say good-morning at breakfast. It is sometimes a matter of years before I can make up my mind. But most young people seem to find it easy?”
“Oh no,” said Rachel. “It’s hard!”
Miss Allan looked at Rachel quietly, saying nothing; she suspected that there were difficulties of some kind. Then she put her hand to the back of her head, and discovered that one of the grey coils of hair had come loose.
“I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me,” she said, rising, “if I do my hair. I have never yet found a satisfactory type of hairpin. I must change my dress, too, for the matter of that; and I should be particularly glad of your assistance, because there is a tiresome set of hooks which I can fasten for myself, but it takes from ten to fifteen minutes; whereas with your help—”
She slipped off her coat and skirt and blouse, and stood doing her hair before the glass, a massive homely figure, her petticoat being so short that she stood on a pair of thick slate-grey legs.
“People say youth is pleasant; I myself find middle age far pleasanter,” she remarked, removing hair pins and combs, and taking up her brush. When it fell loose her hair only came down to her neck.
“When one was young,” she continued, “things could seem so very serious if one was made that way. . . . And now my dress.”