`Spirits!' said Jack, drinking his whisky and soda.
`Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!' said Dukes.
`But it'll come, in time, when we've shoved the cerebral stone away a
bit, the money and the rest. Then we'll get a democracy of touch, instead of
a democracy of pocket.'
Something echoed inside Connie: `Give me the democracy of touch, the
resurrection of the body!' She didn't at all know what it meant, but it
comforted her, as meaningless things may do.
Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored
by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow, and
even by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What hell it was, the continual rattle of
it!
Then, when all the people went, it was no better. She continued
plodding on, but exasperation and irritation had got hold of her lower body,
she couldn't escape. The days seemed to grind by, with curious painfulness,
yet nothing happened. Only she was getting thinner; even the housekeeper
noticed it, and asked her about herself Even Tommy Dukes insisted she was
not well, though she said she was all right. Only she began to be afraid of
the ghastly white tombstones, that peculiar loathsome whiteness of Carrara
marble, detestable as false teeth, which stuck up on the hillside, under
Tevershall church, and which she saw with such grim painfulness from the
park. The bristling of the hideous false teeth of tombstones on the hill
affected her with a grisly kind of horror. She felt the time not far off
when she would be buried there, added to the ghastly host under the
tombstones and the monuments, in these filthy Midlands.
She needed help, and she knew it: so she wrote a little cri du coeur to
her sister, Hilda. `I'm not well lately, and I don't know what's the matter
with me.'
Down posted Hilda from Scotland, where she had taken up her abode. She
came in March, alone, driving herself in a nimble two-seater. Up the drive
she came, tooting up the incline, then sweeping round the oval of grass,
where the two great wild beech-trees stood, on the flat in front of the
house.
Connie had run out to the steps. Hilda pulled up her car, got out, and
kissed her sister.
`But Connie!' she cried. `Whatever is the matter?'
`Nothing!' said Connie, rather shamefacedly; but she knew how she had
suffered in contrast to Hilda. Both sisters had the same rather golden,
glowing skin, and soft brown hair, and naturally strong, warm physique. But
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