Part 60 (2/2)
”Have you any particular plans for August, Alex? I want to get Violet up north as soon as possible, she's done so much rus.h.i.+ng about lately. I wish you could come with us, my dear, but we're going to the Temples'--that's the worst of not having a place of one's own in the country--”
”Oh,” said Alex faintly, ”don't bother about me, Cedric. I shall find somewhere.”
He looked dissatisfied, but said only:
”Well, you'll talk it over with Violet. I know she's been vexed at seeing so little of you lately, but Pamela's an exacting young woman, and chaperoning her is no joke. I wish she'd hurry up and get settled--all this rus.h.i.+ng about is too much for Violet.”
”I thought she liked it.”
”So she does. Anyhow,” said Cedric, with an odd, shy laugh, ”she'd like anything that pleased somebody else. She's made like that. I've never known her anything but happy--like suns.h.i.+ne.” Then he flung a half-smoked cigarette into the fireplace, looked awkward at his own unusual expression of feeling, and abruptly asked Alex if she'd seen the newspaper.
Alex crept away, wondering why happiness should be accounted a virtue.
She loved Violet with a jealous, exclusive affection and admiration, but she thought enviously that she, too, could have been like suns.h.i.+ne if she had received all that Violet received. She, too, would have liked to be always happy.
She had her talk with Violet.
There was the slightest shade of wistfulness in Violet's gentleness.
”I wish we'd made you happier, but I really believe quiet is what you want most, and things aren't ever very quiet here--especially with Pam.
I simply love having her, but I'm not sure she is the best person for you, just now.”
”I don't feel I know her very well. I mean, I'm not at all at home with her. She makes me realize what a stranger I am to the younger ones, after all these years.”
”Poor Alex!”
”You're much more like my sister than she is, and yet a year ago I didn't know you.”
”Alex, dear, I'm so glad if I'm a comfort to you--but I wish you wouldn't speak in that bitter way about poor little Pamela. It seems so unnatural.”
Violet's whole healthy instinct was always, Alex had already discovered, to tend towards the normal--the outlook of well-balanced sanity. She was instinctively distressed by abnormality of any kind.
”I didn't really mean it,” said Alex hurriedly, with the old fatal instinct of propitiation, and read dissent into the silence that received her announcement.
It was the subconscious hope of rectifying herself in Violet's eyes that made her add a moment later:
”Couldn't Barbara have me for a little while when you go up to Scotland?
I think she would be quite glad.”
”Of course she would. She's often lonely, isn't she? And you think you'd be happy with her?”
”Oh, yes,” said Alex eagerly, bent on showing Violet that she had no unnatural aversion from being with her own sister.
But Violet still looked rather troubled.
”You remember that you found it rather difficult there, when you first got back. You said then that Barbara and you had never understood one another even as children.”
”Oh, but that will all be different now,” said Alex, confused, and knowing that her manner was giving an impression of s.h.i.+ftiness from her very consciousness that she was contradicting herself.
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