Adeline sops up Audrey’s face — her eyes swell, cheeks plump up, lips thicken, as she absorbs pert nose, trowel chin, flaming auburn hair. An Ophelia, she thinks, of a Pre-Raph’ sort, lying on her back not in water — but in the effluvium of manufacture, her madness — a sort of palsy — obscured by this murk. She says, I confess, I cannot see much of Stanley in you, my dear — nor of your elder brother. Audrey is dismayed — a reagent that converts most of her ire to raging curiosity, and she effervesces: Have you met him? Adeline smiles and says, No, though I’ve read enough about the phenomenon that is Albert De’Ath in the newspapers to feel as if I have —. The girl returns with a trestle that she kicks open beside them, then goes out and comes back again with a laden tray of tea things that she sets down on it, Chinese or Indian, Miss? she asks, but Adeline says: That won’t be necessary, Flossie, we can manage for ourselves. Once the girl has gone, Audrey, rubbing freed hand with gloved one, says caustically, It’d be no affectation at all, Missus Cameron, if you were to ask Flossie to take some tea with us — I hardly think she’s any more socially inferior than I. Adeline laughs unaffectedly — nor does she commit the crime of saying anything at all. Settling back in the settee, Audrey feels her wet petticoat chafe against her calves. Adeline inquires after preferences: Milk, lemon, sugar? — The tea has a perfumed aroma and a mildly brackish taste: Oolong, Audrey observes, Gilbert used to have it all the time before the war. Now he blames the Kaiser’s submariners for upsetting his beverage habits. Adeline raises one perfectly plucked eyebrow. Is that all he blames them for? she says, and this is evidence of a sympathy that has flared up between them, here, beside a tall vase of late-flowering hydrangeas, here, where a volume is laid casually on a window seat, The Forsyte Saga on its spine, here, next to diamond panes rattled by the October storm. — Night has arrived expectedly, and Adeline rises to draw the curtains — which are cambric and decorated with diamond patterns of tiny yellow flowers to match the yellow-grained wallpaper. I might roll my dampness across them, Audrey thinks, impress myself upon them — repeat the pattern of me: I-am, I-am, I-am. Adeline says, I thought that I’d enjoy the house far more than I have. I take the blame for all the wood panelling, the shutters and the frankly rather. . asinine furnishings. I’d thought — well, what? I suppose that by allowing the medieval inclinations of our celebrated architect full reign he’d create for us a paradisical setting within which the old ways might be re-established. . old honesties. . the barriers between man and woman, mistress and servant, might. . dissolve —. She interrupts herself with more laughter: Utter bosh, naturally — worse than bosh, a species of cant. Two years ago I had a local joiner come and cover the panelling in here, then I had it papered as you see. It’s here that I spend almost all my time — it’s a pleasant enough room, gay and bright, yet no sooner did your brother go to France that it became. . well, a sort of tomb for me. Oh, a flowery enough bower round it — she stabs with her teacake to the right, the left — I’ll grant you, but still a tomb and moreover one that’s inside of this tomb of a house, which in turn is lodged inside another sort of grave altogether. Please — please don’t think I ask for your sympathy, M-Miss D-Death — Audrey?
Still, she has it: the squirming of her on the settee, the grabbing and twisting of a small cushion in her strong hands, is far from refined — not pretty at all. The pine cones spit a resinous scent that should be pleasing — especially when mingled with the fresh flowers and the butter liquefying on Audrey’s teacake. It matters, Audrey sees, that as Adeline manipulates so is she manipulated by those vast and impersonal forces that hold all small beings in thrall. She has not only Audrey’s sympathy but her pity as well — which would surely push her further down into the bloody mud. Poor, poor privilege that availeth you nought. . Such good causes. . the clamour of which presumably once filled your echoing time, are now those that augment the power that has robbed you of your lover — a loss that has, if it is possible, parted you still further from your kowtowing husband, who sits in the echoing House, raising his topper when instinct moves him to baaa more platitudes — while you. . you are like Gilman, with time enough on your soft hands to be tormented by your wallpaper. . Adeline is convulsed by the giant’s fingers pressing into her breasts, her sides, the softly vulnerable pit of her — they poke her unfeelingly — she is nothing, Audrey thinks, but an instrument with which to communicate the trivial nature of human sentiment, a telegraph key repetitively jabbed dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, or a Hello Girl’s switchboard into which are thrust the hard points of connection, when all the giant wishes to convey is goodbye-goodbye-goodbye . .You must, Adeline sobs, forgive me, I do miss him so awfully badly. . She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve, presses it to one coon eye, then the other, staunching her uselessness, her passivity. Audrey, whose own hands fret with the myriad shocks following on from her work, has at least this consolation: that she is a part of the giant — an infinitesimally small part, perhaps a hair twisting on the muscled expanse of his back, but, for all that, a part — whereas this fine lady is nothing at all. Audrey bites into her teacake, savours its warmth and delicacy — bread is at tenpence a loaf, and its price rises more and more, leavened by the blockade of Canadian wheat. Her hostess should be out there in the wind and the rain and the darkness withal, sowing the winter seed and clad in travesty: a kirtle gathered at the waist by a plaited cord of sisal. There — not in here, in her gay tomb, bemoaning the days when the goings on of the SPR or the anti-vivisectionists were enough to fill her empty life with meaning . .Did you, Adeline asks plaintively, have much news from him — any letters? Audrey is angrily piteous — not dishonest. No, she says, Stan was never a writer — a reader, yes, when we were kids we all read, but before we little ones could he went to the library, read the latest scientific romances, then told ’em to us — that’s me and our sisters —. She stops, then resumes: But not writing, not even when he fell under the sway of your friend Willis, no. . especially not then. And you, Adeline, did he write to you?