To the North Read Free Page A

lived singly but were not always alone. In the unreal late moonlight you might hear a ghostly hansom click up the empty road, or see on a pale wall the shadow of an opera cloak… . Nowadays things are much tamer: Lady Waters could put up no reasoned objection to St. John’s Wood.
    Cecilia’s and Emmeline’s house was in Oudenarde Road, which runs quietly down into Abbey Road, funnel of traffic and buses. It had big windows, arched stairs and wrought-iron steps at the back leading down to a small green garden. Cecilia, hesitant over the agent’s order, looking about at the temptingly sunny spaces of floor, had remarked: “It’s a long way from everybody we know …” But Emmeline said: “We never know whom we are going to meet.” From the first glance the house had smiled at them and was their own. So here they had settled.
    This afternoon of Cecilia’s return, when, unannounced at her own request, Lady Waters swept her furs and draperies through the narrow hall into the drawing-room, Emmeline had been doing the flowers. She did not often do flowers and was uncertain of the effect. Tulips spun and flopped at her in the wide-mouthed vases: how did Cecilia ever make tulips stand up? Lady Waters begged Emmeline to go on with what she was doing, saying she also loved tulips, but presently asked Emmeline why she was so restless. The simple arrangement of tulips could not account for this pausing and stepping about —Lady Waters had never done flowers. Emmeline wished she had told the maid she was not at home: as she was generally out at this hour it had not occurred to her. It would, however, have taken more than a formula to turn Lady Waters away: if one were out she came in and waited. Unfamiliar afternoon light in the drawing-room and Emmeline’s thoughtful solitude had been precious… . Emmeline’s manners were perfect, but when she was very much bored she seemed to contract physically and took on an air of mild distress.
    When Emmeline had nothing to say, or could not trouble to think, she would turn her head sideways, appearing thoughtful. She paused gently before she spoke, as though fearing she must disappoint you. She was tall, with slight narrow figure and hands; her movements were leisurely and inconsequent. At twenty-five she looked very young, or perhaps rather ageless. Her red-bronze hair, not cut very short, sprang from a centre parting to fall in loose waves each side of her narrow oval face. The spring of her hair, the arch of her eyebrows, her air between serenity and preoccupation made her look rather like an angel. She was not quite angelic; though she was seldom exactly difficult Cecilia sometimes found her a shade perverse: she mistook theory for principle. Her spectacles, which from an independence that would rather blunder than be directed she seldom wore, had frail tortoiseshell rims the same tone as her hair, and made her look very much more serious and intelligent. She had put on her spectacles now to look at the tulips, for she was very short-sighted: they discomfited Lady Waters.
    Vaguely trailing a tulip, Emmeline stood by the tallboy smiling in silence at Lady Waters. It was hard to believe that her manner could mean nothing. Lady Waters, who had apparently come to stay, loosened her furs impressively and settled among the cushions. She had a fine, massive figure and dressed with expensive disregard of the fashions.
    “It is disturbing for you,” she said, “Cecilia’s perpetual rushing abroad and then home. It is a pity she cannot settle.”
    “It makes variety,” said Emmeline, looking into the tulips.
    “One can have too much variety.”
    “Can one? … I rather like sometimes having the house to myself, though I shouldn’t like it always.”
    Lady Waters, naturally pouncing on this, remarked that Cecilia could not be a restful companion. Emmeline, deferring in silence to this opinion, abandoned the tulip, sat down in a low chair and pulled at a strand of green wool in the