broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her
passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of "Never now, never
now--it is too late," which seemed to ring in the curious, indrawn
cries of the elder woman, filled the girl with a deep wisdom. She
knew the same would ring in her mother's dying cry. Married or
unmarried, it was the same--the same anguish, realized in all its
pain after the age of fifty--the loss in never having been able to
relax, to submit.
Alvina felt very strong and rich in the fact of her youth. For her
it was not too late. For Miss Frost it was for ever too late.
"I don't want to go, dear," said Alvina to the elder woman. "I know
I don't care for him. He is nothing to me."
Miss Frost became gradually silent, and turned aside her face. After
this there was a hush in the house. Alvina announced her intention
of breaking off her engagement. Her mother kissed her, and cried,
and said, with the selfishness of an invalid:
"I couldn't have parted with you, I couldn't." Whilst the father
said:
"I think you are wise, Vina. I have thought a lot about it."
So Alvina packed up his ring and his letters and little presents,
and posted them over the seas. She was relieved, really: as if she
had escaped some very trying ordeal. For some days she went about
happily, in pure relief. She loved everybody. She was charming and
sunny and gentle with everybody, particularly with Miss Frost, whom
she loved with a deep, tender, rather sore love. Poor Miss Frost
seemed to have lost a part of her confidence, to have taken on a new
wistfulness, a new silence and remoteness. It was as if she found
her busy contact with life a strain now. Perhaps she was getting
old. Perhaps her proud heart had given way.
Alvina had kept a little photograph of the man. She would often go
and look at it. Love?--no, it was not love! It was something more
primitive still. It was curiosity, deep, radical, burning curiosity.
How she looked and looked at his dark, impertinent-seeming face. A
flicker of derision came into her eyes. Yet still she looked.
In the same manner she would look into the faces of the young men of
Woodhouse. But she never found there what she found in her
photograph. They all seemed like blank sheets of paper in
comparison. There was a curious pale surface-look in the faces of
the young men of Woodhouse: or, if there was some underneath
suggestive power, it was a little abject or humiliating, inferior,
common. They were all either blank or common.
CHAPTER III
THE MATERNITY NURSE
Of course Alvina made everybody pay for her mood of submission and
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