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Page 58
She must think that out.
The morning after the first dinner together, she woke up in a
condition of regret that she should have been so talkative to Mrs.
Wilkins the night before. What had made her be, she wondered. Now, of
course, Mrs. Wilkins would want to grab, she would want to be
inseparable; and the thought of a grabbing and an inseparableness that
should last four weeks made Scrap's spirit swoon within her. No doubt
the encouraged Mrs. Wilkins would be lurking in the top garden waiting
to waylay her when she went out, and would hail her with morning
cheerfulness. How much she hated being hailed with morning
cheerfulness--or indeed, hailed at all. She oughtn't to have
encouraged Mrs. Wilkins the night before. Fatal to encourage. It was
bad enough not to encourage, for just sitting there and saying nothing
seemed usually to involve her, but actively to encourage was suicidal.
What on earth had made her? Now she would have to waste all the
precious time, the precious, lovely time for thinking in, for getting
square with herself, in shaking Mrs. Wilkins off.
With great caution and on the tips of her toes, balancing herself
carefully lest the pebbles should scrunch, she stole out when she was
dressed to her corner; but the garden was empty. No shaking off was
necessary. Neither Mrs. Wilkins nor anybody else was to be seen. She
had it entirely to herself. Except for Domenico, who presently came
and hovered, watering his plants, again especially all the plants that
were nearest her, no one came out at all; and when, after a long while
of following up thoughts which seemed to escape her just as she had got
them, and dropping off exhausted to sleep in the intervals of this
chase, she felt hungry and looked at her watch and saw that it was past
three, she realized that nobody had even bothered to call her in to
lunch. So that, Scrap could not but remark, if any one was shaken off
it was she herself.
Well, but how delightful, and how very new. Now she would really
be able to think, uninterruptedly. Delicious to be forgotten.
Still, she was hungry; and Mrs. Wilkins, after that excessive
friendliness the night before, might at least have told her lunch was
ready. And she had really been excessively friendly--so nice about
Mellersh's sleeping arrangements, wanting him to have the spare-room
and all. She wasn't usually interested in arrangements, in fact she
wasn't ever interested in them; so that Scrap considered she might be
said almost to have gone out of her way to be agreeable to Mrs.
Wilkins. And, in return, Mrs. Wilkins didn't even bother whether or
not she had any lunch.
Fortunately, though she was hungry, she didn't mind missing a
meal. Life was full of meals. They took up an enormous proportion of
one's time; and Mrs. Fisher was, she was afraid, one of those persons
who at meals linger. Twice now had she dined with Mrs. Fisher, and
each time she had been difficult at the end to dislodge, lingering on
slowly cracking innumerable nuts and slowly drinking a glass of wine
that seemed as if it would never be finished. Probably it would be a
good thing to make a habit of missing lunch, and as it was quite easy
to have tea brought out to her, and as she breakfasted in her room,
only once a day would she have to sit at the dining-room table and
endure the nuts.
Scrap burrowed her head comfortably in the cushions, and with her
feet crossed on the low parapet gave herself up to more thought. She
said to herself, as she had said at intervals throughout the morning:
Now I'm going to think. But, never having thought out anything in her
life, it was difficult. Extraordinary how one's attention wouldn't
stay fixed; extraordinary how one's mind slipped sideways. Settling
herself down to a review of her past as a preliminary to the
consideration of her future, and hunting in it to begin with for any
justification of that distressing word tawdry, the next thing she knew
was that she wasn't thinking about this at all, but had somehow
switched on to Mr. Wilkins.
Well, Mr. Wilkins was quite easy to think about, though not
pleasant. She viewed his approach with misgivings. For not only was
it a profound and unexpected bore to have a man added to the party, and
a man, too, of the kind she was sure Mr. Wilkins must be, but she was
afraid--and her fear was the result of a drearily unvarying experience
--that he might wish to hang about her.
This possibility had evidently not yet occurred to Mrs. Wilkins,
and it was not one to which she could very well draw her attention;
not, that is, without being too fatuous to live. She tried to hope
that Mr. Wilkins would be a wonderful exception to the dreadful rule.
If only he were, she would be so much obliged to him that she believed
she might really quite like him.
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