"Here are the three railway tickets, ma'am," said Turner, who had brought up the letter. "I think we had better take charge of them."
Zora laughed, and when Turner had left the room she laughed again. Clem Sypher's letter and Septimus's ticket lay side by side on her dressing-table, and they appealed to her sense of humor. They represented the net result of her misanthropic travels.
What would her mother say? What would Emmy say? What would be the superior remark of the Literary Man from London?
She, Zora Middlemist, who had announced in the market place, with such a flourish of trumpets, that she was starting on her glorious pilgrimage to the Heart of Life, abjuring all conversation with the execrated male sex, to have this ironical adventure! It was deliciously funny. Not only had she found two men in the Heart of Life, but she was bringing them back with her to Nunsmere. She could not hide them from the world in the secrecy of her own memory: there they were in actual, bodily presence, the sole trophies of her quest.
Yet she put a postscript to a letter to her mother.
"I know, in your dear romantic way, you will declare that these two men have fallen in love with me. You'll be wrong. If they had, I shouldn't have anything to do with them. It would have made them quite impossible."
The energy with which she licked and closed the envelope was remarkable but unnecessary.
CHAPTER VI
Things happen slowly at Nunsmere—from the grasping of an idea to the pace of the church choir over the hymns. Life there is no vulgar, tearing two-step, as it is in Godalming, London, and other vortices of human passions, but the stately measure of a minuet. Delights are deliberate and have lingering ends. A hen would scorn to hatch a chicken with the indecent haste of her sister in the next parish.