“I SHALL never forget,” continued Francie, through the open dressing-room door, “the way he picked up those cushions.”

“Which?” said Hugo, searching irritably among his collars. The feudal system was weak at some points, he reflected—this Danielstown laundry. The laundress’s father had helped to defend the house in the troubled ’sixties. Nostalgic, he thought of these neat democratic blue vans labelled “hygienic” that called on Mondays. “Well really,” said he, “I may just as well go to bed. I haven’t a collar left fit to dine in.... Which cushions?”

“Oh, horrors. But then they say the Fogartys are so kind.—Never mind, Hugo; Richard’s and Laurence’s collars are just the same.—You know how alive he is generally: well, that was all gone. It was like seeing a waterfall stand still. You know, Hugo, it may be horrid, but I don’t trust Myra sometimes. She says things aren’t, and then she turns and makes these curious little dabs at them. She dislikes the Clonmore rectory people, she says they are breath-y, she knows I don’t know them and yet she insisted on my going up. And when I came down again she was charming; I knew I must have annoyed her.”

“My dear Francie, life is too short for all this.” (Though that was not the matter with life, really: life was too long.) Hugo frowned, chin up in front of his glass. “It’s a good thing the evenings are drawing in,” he said, with reference to his collar.

“Now what I should have said ...” resumed Francie, “though ideally, really, I shouldn’t have said anything....”

“Talking of evenings,” said Hugo, “where do we go next? We’ve got to fit in the Fitzgeralds before October. Oughtn’t you to be writing to somebody? And oh, Francie, you might post some of these collars to the Terenure laundry, if you can get the parcel out of the house quietly.”

“I shall miss here,” sighed Francie, looking out at the trees.

“You miss everywhere.” They both thought of the bungalow which, an eternal present for them, would be never able to shine in retrospect. Throughout dinner, Francie was distraite. She was making out in her mind a little letter to Gerald. But, of course, that would never do.

“Hullo!” said Laurence, earlier, looking at the letters put out for next morning’s post on the hall table. “Lois has written to Marda. I thought no one knew her address.”

“She heard from Marda this morning,” explained his uncle, bending to study the envelope with melancholy interest. “I understand that it was about a dog. I shall be relieved when Marda is married. I wonder will the young man be able to look after luggage.”

“I ran into Mr. Lesworth this afternoon,” Lady Naylor told Lois. “He came into the Fogartys’ while I was resting there. Really, she keeps quite a home for those young men—though nothing would ever take the gloss off those cushions. He seemed very cheerful, he was on his way up to the tennis.”

“He never goes to the tennis on Club days.”

“Oh, well, he seemed to be on his way up to the tennis. He told me of that young Armstrong’s engagement to Livvy Thompson. It seems quite a fait accompli, though secret, of course. How things do get round in a garrison town! You knew, I suppose?”

“Well, Livvy did tell me.”

“What a bother for you!” said Lady Naylor. “It is a comfort to have outgrown one’s friends’ engagements. I suppose you couldn’t very well tell her it was preposterous?”

“Well, I ...”

“Mr. Lesworth thought it a pity, in view of the young man’s future. He expects Mr. Armstrong will not stand well over this with their Colonel at all. I think he can’t understand his friends not being keener on his career. I suppose it will end by their just going out to one of those coffee or orange places in Africa. But, of course, Livvy is used to a dull life.”

“But I don’t see ...”

“And there isn’t much else for her. I can’t see poor Livvy at a school of art, though she might typewrite.”

“She would do for a model,” said Laurence, who had been listening with interest to this conversation from his side of the table. “They should be either voluminous or very spiky.”

At this point, the candles were brought in—Lady Naylor had been delayed in Clonmore, they were dining late. The sharp flames shivered, every one blinked; the dahlias became theatrical.

“Autumn,” pronounced Sir Richard. “There should be less of this ambushing and skirmishing and hey-fidaddling now that the days are drawing in.”

“But as an English friend of mine pointed out,” said Hugo, “this Irish fighting is not cricket.”

Laurence maintained that this way of fighting was consistent, efficient and very natural. Why, he asked, be high-toned about a war?

“Oh dear,” said Francie, “you sound just like a pacifist!”

“What else did Gerald say?” Lois wanted to know.

“I really cannot remember,” said Lady Naylor; “he was as pleasant as ever, but, of course, not original. He seemed in a hurry to be getting up to the tennis.”

Lois, dissatisfied, blinked gloomily in the candlelight.

About half-past ten, Francie—having been taken up to her room by Myra, with a suggestion of having been put away for the night—crept out again to the ante-room, listening. Her candlestick, wobbling with indecision, brushed the ceiling with shadows. Wires twanged where some cattle rubbed on a fence in the damp darkness. Francie went across and tapped on Lois’s door.

Lois turned in alarm from the dark window where she stood holding her elbows, not quite thinking. Her heart thumped as the crack of the door widened, letting in foreign light. “Damn,” she thought with annoyance. She had been up here for more than an hour and had not begun to undress. To look more natural she undid her frock and stepped quickly out of it.

Mrs. Montmorency, yellow under the chin, appeared deprecatingly. She had just thought, she said, of a little chat. She looked round hopelessly, she could not think where to put down her candle. This decided—a little table presented itself—her difficulties seemed to be over. She said at once: “The young man, Lois, seems so unhappy.”

“But we’re engaged,” said Lois, tying her dressing-gown firmly round her hips.

“Oh ... Are you certain? Because ...”

“What did he say?” said Lois, at once defensive.

“My dear, I was up at the rectory. I am sure your aunt meant everything for the best.”

Lois went to the glass and took down her hair distractedly. Shaking it over her face she said, muffled: “You mean she has interfered?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say she’d done that. But it seems a pity ...”

“Really,” cried Lois, glad of the hair because her anger did sound to herself faintly academic, “she is as designing as ... a cardinal.”

“As I said to Hugo, you have enough sense, you are so modern ... and after all you will only be young once.”

“Oh. Were you all there?”

“My dear, I tell you, I was up at the rectory. But from the way he picked up the cushions ... I can’t bear lives to go wrong.”

This came out so vehemently, with such an effect of passion that Lois, surprised, said: “Neither can I, really.” And looking round, she found the shadows exaggerated with solemnity; the thin candle-flames stretched up anxiously: a predicament must have become noticeable, even to the room. Impressed by strangeness, by this pressure of emergency, Lois plaited her hair in two plaits instead of one and felt herself a different woman.

“What they never see,” she said rapidly, “is, that I must do something.”

“I should write at once,” said Francie, “I’m not sure that I shouldn’t even telegraph, if it were not for the post-mistress. I should say ... Well, I don’t know really: I do wish Marda were here!”

“If I learn German they say, why not Italian? And when I learn Italian they take no interest.”

Francie picked up the evening dress that Lois had just stepped out of, stared, and remarked to it, almost with incredulity: “Love is everything!”

“At least Gerald is definite. He, I ...”

“I know love is so important.”

“At least it may get one somewhere.”

Francie, raising her voice to a scared note, as though she must make quite certain what they were really talking about, cried: “There are such mistakes!”

“I wouldn’t mind being properly tragic....”

“If one’s not quite certain, one never knows where one is.”

“—It’s just that I feel so humiliated the whole time.”

“But the young man ...” persisted Francie. They looked at each other, or at where the other had been. Francie, deserted at once by the conspiratorial courage that brought her in, dolefully put a finger over her lips, as though betrayed irrevocably by what had come out of them. She visibly shrank with misgiving.

“You seem very intellectual, Lois. Do—do you not love him?”

“I must,” said Lois. She put her hands up to the back of her neck, fumbling open the clasp of her corals. She could feel the bright girl she had been for Mrs. Montmorency disintegrate: much that even she had taken to be herself went with the illusion.

“I just thought I might have helped,” said Francie, in a spent, remote little voice, as though they were both coming back from a funeral to an imposingly vacant house.

“Oh, you have indeed,” said Lois. And she stood there vacantly and, she felt, rather gruesomely smiling, weighing her coral beads up and down in a hand, trying to remember what they had both said, what they had meant, what it had been about.

Francie took up her heavy candlestick and looked about for the door. She sighed and said it had been a tiring day. She could not bear to feel she was not missed out after all, had not been passed by because there was nothing to pass her. It was late at night for so fundamental a disappointment. There seemed some difficulty about getting her back to her room, though they both desired this. Lois opened the door; they heard Sir Richard and Hugo arguing up the stairs. Francie shielded her candle-flame with her hand and wavered out round the door like a shadow.

Lois, hot with retrospective embarrassment, slipped from her clothes and blew out the candles quickly. The dark was gratefully positive. She lay on her side with knees drawn up to her chin, blankness snowing down on her till, quite snowed up in blankness, she was asleep.

Next day, mist lay on the fields like a blanket, muffling sound so that the postman arrived unexpectedly. He brought a letter from Gerald: “For God’s sake see me.” She meant to go out to meet Gerald, bright and matter of fact, but this miscarried: when he came, in the evening, she was half-way down from the garden, fighting with Laurence over a snail. He had walked on the snail on purpose.

“Ough—you fool ... you beast, Laurence!”

“Well, I didn’t mean to be kind to it.”

“Just because it had no mentality.”

“Not at all.”

“Ough, it’s all over the path.”

“It’s scrunched ... I dare say,” said Laurence, pleased, “I am pathological.”

“Great fat feet!”

As a matter of fact, he was sorry about the snail; he had thought it was just a shell, but he wasn’t going to say so. “Little mother,” he said unpleasantly.

“Laurence, you’re insane. Ough, you’re wiping it off everywhere. I shall be sick!”

“Do.”

“Well, I won’t then.”

“I had no idea you were so fond of animals,” he said as offensively as possible. But he was not feeling up to much this evening and could not think what else to say to her. He turned and walked briskly away towards the avenue, conscious of having no objective. An unusual evening, however, awaited him. In a boreen in the Castle Trent direction he met three armed men coming out of a gate. They made him put up his hands and march smartly down the boreen ahead of them. He discovered that under these conditions the mind works fast but unfruitfully; he noted details sharply and then forgot. When they came to the wall of the graveyard he was embarrassed, but they only asked for his shoes and the loan of his wrist-watch. Placing him with his face close up to the wall they advised him for life’s sake not to look round or stir for twenty minutes. “How shall I know?” said Laurence, “you’ve got my watch.” But they did not care and went away with his shoes. Laurence remained with his forehead against the stone for fifty minutes, horse-flies biting him through the socks. Then he limped home to dinner and an audience, considerably cheered. Three days after, the watch was posted back to his Uncle Richard: it was in excellent order and ticked as it was taken out of the package. “Which just shows,” said Sir Richard, holding the watch to his ear with satisfaction. But that was a day of confusion; nobody listened.

As Lois ran down from the garden, swollen about the personality with annoyance, she saw Gerald waiting at a turn of the path by a holly tree. He looked intently at her advancing, without comprehension, as though she had been a picture. Though they were alone, he did not put out a hand or move towards her. He stood there with the vigour, grief and indifference of a tree that cannot help growing.

“Gerald?”

“What’s the matter?” he said, impassive.

“Oh, Laurence walked on a snail!”

“Bad luck!”

“My dear, he liked it.”

“Queer,” said Gerald, finding the word with difficulty.

“Where shall we go?” she asked, while something in her stopped like a clock with foreboding. The encounter, uncoloured by surprise or passion, left her quite at a loss. Unkissed, her mouth and cheeks felt a touch of ice.

“It seems now,” said Gerald, impersonally, as though delivering a message, “that we can’t ever be married.”

“Why? When?” she cried angrily.

Gerald looked at her under level eyelids. She remembered saying: “I wish you wouldn’t keep looking so pleased the whole time.” Now his look and silence were cold with a doomed expectancy: she nearly hated him. Dumbly, in happy-seeming physical agreement like a pair of animals, they wheeled off down the path together, crossed the yard rapidly and came into the plantation ribbed with shadow and lanced across with light about the eye-level. He told her her aunt agreed he was not good enough, it would never do at all, her aunt had said. Looking angrily up the tree-trunks, she exclaimed that her aunt was mad. She repeated this with vehemence and confusion, pulling at her fingers. He listened to her in silence, wounded, wounded. She wished they had not come down—overruling possibly in each other some desire for space—to the plantation where, constricted by firs, thought and movement were difficult and upright shadows emphasized his severity. “She advised me,” Gerald concluded, “to have a frank talk with you.”

“Is this the frank talk now?”

“She was certain you didn’t love me.”

“Gerald—why weren’t you furious?”

“I ... I don’t know,” he said, surprised by the question. She saw him standing confused, like a foreigner with whom by some failure in her vocabulary all communication was interrupted. Her mind halted and she wanted to run away. “Gerald, come back. I’m wretched. Why do we have to talk?”

“I thought you liked that....” Outside himself with passion he cried: “I’d rather be dead than not understand!”

“But don’t you know I ...? Gerald?”

If he did not know, it would be quite over. She watched with agony what seemed to be his indifference. They were each waiting for the other. He watched her hand, on a tree-trunk, pick like a bird at the scaly bark. Her hand, which immediately centred her consciousness of him, paused and became quite rigid, fingers spread out. When he saw her hand so quiet, he would have to be certain. And he immediately said with his usual little resigned inflection: “You see, you are everything.”

“I know,” she said, impersonal.

“I suppose you are what I mean by life.... Do you understand at all?”

“You sometimes make me.” She wanted to add: “Touch me now:” it was the only way across. In her impotence, her desolation—among the severe trees—at not being compelled, she made a beseeching movement which he—remote in a rather sublime perplexity that transcended pain—either ignored or rejected. From the stables, the six o’clock bell sent out relief in a jerky, metallic passage of sound through the plantation. She wanted something to look at, to follow: a train curving past in a rush. With an exaggerated movement, she put up her hands to her ears. Gerald’s face, in a band of light, remained impassible.

“Gerald, you’re making us lose each other!” she shouted above the bell.

“But I mean to say: what would you lose?”

“Everything.”

“Do you mean that?” A light ran almost visibly up inside him. She saw now where they were and why he had come.

She thought of going, hesitating with delight, to the edge of an unknown high-up terrace, of Marda, of getting into a train. “No,” she cried, terrified, “why should I?”

“Then we don’t mean the same thing.”

“Why don’t you make me ... like you?”

“I thought I could. I know I can—when I’m not with you.”

“Damn, damn,” said Lois. “I do want you!” Gerald said piteously: “Then why can’t it all be simple?”

“But it’s our being so young,” she said, too eagerly, “and then, money. I mean, we have got to be practical.”

He explained to her, wide-eyed: “It isn’t anything practical that makes all this—like death. What she said was; that if you loved me ...”

“It’s like a nightmare that even you should begin to talk. I thought you were a rock: I was safe with you. Gerald, really, this is all like a net; little twists of conversation knotted together. One can’t move, one doesn’t know where one is. I really can’t live at all if it has all got to be arranged. I tell you, even what I think isn’t my own, and Mrs. Montmorency comes bursting into my room at nights. Even Marda—nothing we said to each other mattered, it hasn’t stayed, she goes off to get married in a mechanical sort of way. She thinks herself so damned funny—it’s cheap, really. All that matters is what you believe—Gerald, you’ll kill me, just standing there. You don’t know what it’s like for a snail, being walked on....”

“I don’t understand you,” he cried in agony. “Who is a snail?”

“I didn’t ask you to understand me: I was so happy, I was so safe.”

Gerald noticed a change somewhere; the light was gone from his face, moving down the trees it had disappeared. He looked at his wrist-watch. They had been a short time together, almost twenty minutes. “When were you happy?” he said accurately. He would have liked to be sure of this, and of several other matters: she was not collected enough to explain. He eyed the incredible wood, the path, her unchanged figure in the cheerful blue woollen dress. Something struggled free in his brain and said, quite apart from his numbed self: “My darling, don’t, don’t rack yourself. You know this will be always the same for me. Whatever’s impossible, you will always be perfect. I know we’re different about things: if that didn’t hurt you it would never matter to me. I mean, don’t let’s be disappointed. You know I’m not giving you up, I could never have done that. But it’s just that, you see, you never ... I suppose things can’t come out what one wants.... I suppose it would hardly do....”

“But, Gerald, where are we?”

He said, “Don’t worry.” They were both, he knew, entirely lost.

“But what have I done? What have I not done?” After a minute, during which she heard him finger his belt—his fingers slipped on the leather—she shut her eyes and said, “So you’re certain I don’t love you?”

No answer. “Oh, leave that belt alone, Gerald!”

Still no answer, as though he were asleep. And indeed he felt, as at the approach of sleep, an immense indifference. She, tortured by the loneliness of insomnia, had to cry out: “Won’t you even just try—won’t you just kiss me?”

“I don’t think ...”

“All right.”

“Look, I must go now.” Vaguely, he saluted and began to go up the path, towards the beech walk, towards the house.

“Good-bye?” she said.

He only half paused. “No, don’t let’s ...” “Where did you leave your bicycle?”

He was well up the path; he called back: “Against the hedge. You know, under the tennis courts.”

She knew; she remembered him pulling leaves from the privet hedge, scattering them on the grass and throwing them over her. She remembered that Mrs. Boatley was a Christian Scientist. It seemed a good thing summer was practically over; there might not be more tennis parties. But at this the incomprehensible glare of summer blinded her, bringing tears to her eyes. “Gerald!” she called.

But by this time he seemed to be out of ear-shot.