Between the Acts

"It seems more," said Isa. "It seems from the terrace as if the land went on for ever and ever."

"

Are we really," she said, turning round, "a hundred miles from the sea?"

"Thirty-five only," her father-in-law said, as if he had whipped a tape measure from his pocket and measured it exactly.

She flushed, and the little breath too was audible that she drew in as once more he struck a blow at her faith. But, brother and sister, flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth.

What she saw he didn't; what he saw she didn't—and so on, ad infinitum.

His tail never wagged. He never admitted the ties of domesticity. Either he cringed or he bit. Now his wild yellow eyes gazed at her, gazed at him. He could outstare them both. Then Oliver remembered:

Thus the mirror that reflected the soul sublime, reflected also the soul bored.

Books are the mirrors of the soul."

Inner love was in the eyes; outer love on the dressing-table

she added, slipping into the cliché conveniently provided by fiction.

Tempted by the sight to continue her imaginative reconstruction of the past, Mrs. Swithin paused; she was given to increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alleys; but she remembered her mother—her mother in that very room rebuking her. "Don't stand gaping, Lucy, or the wind'll change … "