And Sally subsides, but first makes a stipulation: "You will sleep in your hair, mother darling, won't you? Or, at least, do it up, and not that hateful nightcap?"
But though Rosalind felt conscientiously able to disclaim any of the sounds Sally had described, something audible had occurred in her breathing. Sally's first word had gone nearest, but it was hardly a full-grown gasp.
Her husband's question about "Pickwick" had scarcely taken her attention off an exciting story-climax, and she really did want to know why the Archbishop turned pale as death when the Countess kissed him. Gerry was looking well and cheerful again, and there was nothing to connect his inquiry with any reminiscence of "B.C." So, as soon as he had gone, she reopened her book—not without a mental allusion to a dog in Proverbs—and went on where she had left off. The writer had not known how to manage his Archbishop and Countess, and the story went flat and slushy like an ill-whipped zabajone. She put the book aside, and wondered whether "Pickwick" really had been alienated by the impossible Haliburtons; sat thinking, but only of the thing of now—nothing of buried records.
So she sat, it might be for two minutes. Then, quite suddenly, she had bitten her lip and her brows had wrinkled. And her eyes had locked to a fixed look that would stay till she had thought this out. So her face said, and the stillness of her hand.
For she had suddenly remembered when and where it was she had read to that man about Mary and the fat boy. It was in the garden at her mother's twenty-two years ago. She remembered it well now, and quite suddenly. She could remember how Gerry, young-man-wise, had tried to utilise Thackeray to show his greater knowledge of the world—had flaunted Piccadilly and Pall Mall before the dazzled eyes of an astonished suburban. She could remember how she read it aloud to him, because, when he read over her shoulder, she always turned the page before he was ready. And his decision that Dickens's characters were never gentlemen, and her saying perhaps that was why he was so amusing.
And then how he got the book from her and went on reading while she went away for her lawn-tennis shoes, and when she came back found he had only two more pages to read, and then he would come and play.
But it spoke well for her husband's chances of a quiet time to-night that he should hold this memory in his mind, and yet be secure against a complete resurrection of the past. Nothing else might grow from it. He evidently thought the reading had been at Shepherd's Bush. He would hardly have said, "the kitten wasn't there," unless his ideas had been glued to that spot. But then—and Rosalind's mind swam to think of it—how very decisively the kitten was "not there" in that other garden two-and-twenty years ago.
It was at that moment the gasp, or sigh, or sob, or whatever it was, awoke Sally. Her mother had been strong against the mere memory of the happy hour of thoughtless long ago; but then, this that was to come—this thing the time was thoughtless of! Was it not enough to force a gasp from self-control itself? a cry from any creature claiming to be human? "The kitten wasn't there!" No, truly she was not.