unbearable.
"I can't understand that you disliked Mr. Witham so much?" said Miss
Pinnegar.
"We never can understand those things," said Alvina. "I can't
understand why I dislike tapioca and arrowroot--but I do."
"That's different," said Miss Pinnegar shortly.
"It's no more easy to understand," said Alvina.
"Because there's no need to understand it," said Miss Pinnegar.
"And is there need to understand the other?"
"Certainly. I can see nothing wrong with him," said Miss Pinnegar.
Alvina went away in silence. This was in the first months after she
had given Albert his dismissal. He was at Oxford again--would not
return to Woodhouse till Christmas. Between her and the Woodhouse
Withams there was a decided coldness. They never looked at her
now--nor she at them.
None the less, as Christmas drew near Alvina worked up her feelings.
Perhaps she would be reconciled to him. She would slip across and
smile to him. She would take the plunge, once and for all--and kiss
him and marry him and bear the little half-fishes, his children. She
worked herself into quite a fever of anticipation.
But when she saw him, the first evening, sitting stiff and staring
flatly in front of him in Chapel, staring away from everything in
the world, at heaven knows what--just as fishes stare--then his
dishumanness came over her again like an arrest, and arrested all
her flights of fancy. He stared flatly in front of him, and flatly
set a wall of oblivion between him and her. She trembled and let be.
After Christmas, however, she had nothing at all to think forward
to. And it was then she seemed to shrink: she seemed positively to
shrink.
"You never spoke to Mr. Witham?" Miss Pinnegar asked.
"He never spoke to me," replied Alvina.
"He raised his hat to me."
"_You_ ought to have married him, Miss Pinnegar," said Alvina. "He
would have been right for you." And she laughed rather mockingly.
"There is no need to make provision for me," said Miss Pinnegar.
And after this, she was a long time before she forgave Alvina, and
was really friendly again. Perhaps she would never have forgiven her
if she had not found her weeping rather bitterly in her mother's
abandoned sitting-room.
Now so far, the story of Alvina is commonplace enough. It is more or
less the story of thousands of girls. They all find work. It is the
ordinary solution of everything. And if we were dealing with an
ordinary girl we should have to carry on mildly and dully down the
long years of employment; or, at the best, marriage with some dull
school-teacher or office-clerk.
But we protest that Alvina is not ordinary. Ordinary people,
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