The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West Page A

vulgarity, which had invited this humiliation. Well, she had been wrong. For this same humiliation had befallen herself to the fullest extent. She realized that the tone of every word she had addressed to Laurence since he had arrived in Europe, the quality of every movement she had made in his presence, had been determined by the silent assurances he had given her regarding his intention of asking her to marry him; and that now that he had sharply withdrawn these assurances, there was not one of those words and movements but was ridiculous and shameful.
    Now the Bakers were standing over her, offering handshakes, exploding amiably in greetings and professions of surprise. She found herself thinking grimly that Michael’s face had grown looser with happiness, that he had been a great deal handsomer when he was married to the first, the notoriously scourge-like Mrs. Baker. Then her heart sank. So it was thus that life forced on one unawares the characteristics that earlier had seemed most pernicious and most easily avoidable. Till then she had thought of the hatred felt by the unhappy for the happy as sheer gratuitous vice. The thing that Laurence was doing to her. She would never, she saw, feel free to be honestly friendly with any man again or, as it appeared, with any woman either. She was aware that thousands of women, when asked what they wished to order for a meal, thought fit to announce with a little laugh that they were dieting. It was nothing to their discredit, they might be as useful and agreeable as the many women who wore corsets or sang to their friends after dinner, or did any of those things which, though they were not illegal, she would not do herself. Yet she found herself counting this heavily to Mrs. Baker’s discredit, and doubting the debit when, after all, she ordered a rich and schoolgirlish repast; and the reason for this injustice was simply that the little bride’s face, which was round and wholesome as a cup custard, had plainly never been flushed by any sort of shameful withdrawal of the conventional value attached to her sex. Isabelle understood at last why women are supposed to hate each other. Such an experience as hers was bound to engender a hundred kinds of enmity. Henceforward she would feel abashed before any woman who had not been rejected like herself; she would be cagy in her dealings with any woman who, having suffered such a rejection, would be likely to guess her own disgrace. This was a poisoning of the very springs of sincerity. Even now she was grinning too much, prolonging throughout the meal an affectation of palpitating interest in the honeymooning couple which it would have been natural to have dropped after the first five minutes. But at least Laurence was doing that too. For whatever reason he had decided to hurt her, he was hurting himself too. She was not too sorry about that. So she had grown cruel too.
    But suddenly she found herself sincere again. “What, must you really go?” she exclaimed when Michael rose at an incredibly early moment, when some compote had just been put down before her, and said that he and his wife must return to their hotel to be picked up by some friends who were making an early start for the country. Nothing indeed could have been more real than her distress, for it meant that, unless the honeymooners were to suspect how things were, she must stay and finish her meal alone with Laurence. Fortunately he went right out to the pavement with them, and by the time he got back she had only a greengage or two to swallow. But when he was sitting opposite her again, the fineness of his hands, which were all of him her downcast eyes could see, as they lay folded in front of him on the tablecloth, brought a lump to her throat because they were so typical of his general fineness, such evidence that he had been really what she wanted.
    “Well, Laurence, this has been very nice,” she said, as she put down her spoon and prepared to pick up her bag and