"Oh, Connie, I've told you before that I have done my best. Don't let us start the discussion all over again."
"It's all very well, but if you'd only let me go on that chicken farm with Hilda there wouldn't have been any need to discuss it."
"And you wouldn't have been going to a dance to-night either. You know quite well that you would never have made it pay. We don't want to start all that again, surely."
They were passing through the main streets now, and the lamps looked through into the warm stuffiness of the car.
"At any rate," said Mrs. Hammond, calling up her courage, "it is going to be a nice dance." She had said that so many times. "You did say that the doctor was coming, didn't you, Connie?"
"He said he might." Connie's manner was off-hand, but in the darkness her face softened, and her brown eyes glowed with expectation.
She didn't care twopence for the little Scotch doctor, she told herself; but she was sick, sick, sick of Miller's Rise. She was sick of dressing up her fine young body, which nobody cared to see. She was sick of living through the long months of the year all on top of Muriel and her mother, sick of scenes with her father, because he would neither let her go away nor give her the allowance that she considered necessary. And she was sick of her mother's fretful hints and of her father's stupid chaffing. She was weary of cinema romances, where true love always triumphed. She was weary of Marshington reality where her school friends and neighbours smirked at her above their diamond half-hoops, or simpered at her over piles of trousseau lingerie. At twenty-one she had smiled when other girls talked about proposals; at twenty-two she had blushed and answered irritably; at twenty-three she had lied shamelessly and shrieked her noisy, jolly laugh. At twenty-four she would have no further need to lie.
She pushed back a curl of springing hair, and tried to imagine married life with Hugh McKissack. The wind enfolded the car in the fierce caress of brushing wings, tumultuous as love, as love, thought Connie. "Love," she whispered to herself, "Love, love, love," as though by an incantation she could call it to her.
There was a sentence in The Romance of Emmeline by Sylvia Carlton, that had sung itself into her seeking mind.
". . . And as he approached her, her heart beat faster. In all that crowded room they were alone. He only took her hand, but his eyes caressed her, and youth and spring, sweet with laughter, clamorous with birdsong, leapt from the loneliness to meet them. Their formal greeting sang like a passionate poem, and in the shadows of her eyes he saw the amorous darkness of the perfumed night."