"If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward."
She was frightened out of her life.
Leonora writhed on her couch and called out:
"Oh, God!..." Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin; for wet handkerchiefs.
It never occurred to her that Leonora's expression of agony was for anything else than physical pain.
You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl's room at night.
I have been casting back again; but I cannot help it.
It is so difficult to keep all these people going.
I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind.
And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind.
I wish I could put it down in diary form.
Thus: On the 1st of September they returned from Nauheim.
Leonora at once took to her bed.
By the 1st of October they were all going to meets together.
Nancy had already observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner.
About the 6th of that month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle.
On the 20th she read the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the papers of the 18th and the two following days.
On the 23rd she had the conversation with her aunt in the hall—about marriage in general and about her own possible marriage, her aunt's coming to her bedroom did not occur until the 12th of November....
Thus she had three weeks for introspection—for introspection beneath gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows.
It was not a good situation for a girl.
She began thinking about love, she who had never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous, rather nonsensical matter.
She remembered chance passages in chance books—things that had not really affected her at all at the time.
She remembered someone's love for the Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals—though she did not know what the vitals were.
She had a vague recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to have taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers' existences were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs.
Once she went to the little cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play.
It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn for music.
Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found herself playing.
She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on the fading day.
Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking after some planting up in the new spinney.
Thus she found herself playing on the old piano.
She did not know how she came to be doing it.
A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk—a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high lights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths.
Well, it was a silly old tune....
It goes with the words—they are about a willow tree, I think: Thou art to all lost loves the best The only true plant found.
—That sort of thing.
It is Herrick, I believe, and the music with the reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick, And it was dusk; the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were like mourning presences; the fire had sunk to nothing—a mere glow amongst white ashes.... It was a sentimental sort of place and light and hour....
And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying quietly; she went on to cry with long convulsive sobs.
It seemed to her that everything gay, everything charming, all light, all sweetness, had gone out of life.
Unhappiness; unhappiness; unhappiness was all around her.
She seemed to know no happy being and she herself was agonizing....
She remembered that Edward's eyes were hopeless; she was certain that he was drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply.
He appeared as a man who was burning with inward flame; drying up in the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals.
Then, the torturing conviction came to her—the conviction that had visited her again and again—that Edward must love some one other than Leonora.
With her little, pedagogic sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing.
But Edward was a Protestant.
Then Edward loved somebody....
And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the old St Bernard beside her did.
At meals she would feel an intolerable desire to drink a glass of wine, and then another and then a third.
Then she would find herself grow gay....
But in half an hour the gaiety went; she felt like a person who is burning up with an inward flame; desiccating at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals.