She saw it, sensed it, heard it—and stonily
regarded it. A thing to weep at, she knew it;
but did not weep. A thing to stab her, it ought
to; but did not stab. What good could she do?
Suppose she had got up and gone down; suppose she
now got up and went down and went back? What
good? All sentimentality that. Be sensible!
If a thousand pounds would do Keggo any good, and
if she had a thousand pounds, freely and gladly she
would give the last penny of it. But to get down,
to have got down, what could she have done? Why
should she worry about her? Keggo had had her
chance. Everybody had their chance. She
now had hers. Why should she...
She never saw Keggo again.
She had not good health in the week immediately following
that great day. She did not feel well. She
did not look very well. Mr. Simcox, profoundly
sympathetic to every mood of her who was at once his
protege and his support, told her he thought she had
been overdoing it. She seized upon that excuse
and tried to persuade herself that perhaps she had;
or, which amounted to the same thing, that she was
suffering from the revulsion of those huge excitements.
But she did not persuade herself. Her malaise,
whatever it was, was not of that kind. Its manifestations
were not in lassitude or sense of disability.
They were in a curious dis-ease whose occasion was
not to be defined; in a consuming restlessness beneath
whose goad even the significant apartment had not
power to charm and hold her; in a certain feverishness
whose exsiccative heat, leaving her palms and temples
cool (she sometimes felt them and had surprise) caused
inwardly a dry burning that made her long for quiet
places.
She could not settle to anything. Her limbs,
and they had their way, desired not to rest; her mind,
and it deposed her captaincy, would cast no anchor.
Mr. Simcox, as the week drew on, suggested a weekend
at home. It had occurred to her, very attractively,
but she had negatived it. Aunt Belle (before
the idea had come to her) had written an invitation
to one of the Saturday dinners in which she had “most
particularly, my dear child” desired her presence.
Something most delightful was going to happen and
she must be there. She had accepted and she later
told herself she did not like to refuse. She knew,
instantly as she read, what was the identity of this
delightful thing that was to happen and she decided,
with a sharp turn within her of some emotion, that
certainly she would be there. To whet her scorn!
She was thereafter much aggravated that her drifting
mind, against her wish, swayed constantly towards
it sometimes with that same sharp turn of that same
emotion (nameless to her and without meaning) always
with aggravation of her restlessness, of her fever,
of her dis-ease. When came Mr. Simcox’s
suggestion of the week-end at home she decided, as
swiftly as she had first accepted, to revoke her acceptance.
She would not be there! She would not—waste
her scorn!
