Anna enjoyed the party. Coming with Catherine, she was an important guest. She received a good deal of attention and was treated with respect, as a friend of Catherine’s, and, in her own right, as an effective type. She was happy in the unconventional, casually intellectual atmosphere. She liked it. Usually, in collections of people, she was lost. She was too much an individualist to shine in a crowd or take kindly to social gatherings. People overshadowed her: made her ineffectuaclass="underline" cancelled her out. Even people she knew well had the power to make her feel unimportant, almost obliterated. She could not hold her own with them.
But this night was otherwise. She was out of herself. As she moved, the dark stuff of her dress — it was a very soft silk, flexible — ran over her limbs like a black fluid concealing her. She liked the feel of the silk flowing so softly dark about her body. She felt herself disguised. This night was not in her life. It was a moment isolated and unmarked. While she talked, she did not feel any self-consciousness, only excitement.
The reaction came in the morning. Then the realization of her own loneliness came over her, she knew herself among strangers. What strangers they were to her, Catherine and the rest! She was so far away from them, with their bold, showy, shallow intellectualism, that seemed simply an affectation. She had not learnt the patter. She did not know how to work the trick. So she felt at a disadvantage. She had committed unpardonable offences of stupidity, bad taste and Philistinism, according to their code. She was married to a nonentity: she was about to go and live in an uncivilized land. She was outside the pale. Even with Catherine, who admired her and treated her as a person of importance, she felt inferior, almost ashamed. She had disgraced herself by Catherine’s standards. So she was in a hurry to get away.
She was up early, and ready to depart. It was a cold, grey morning, threatening rain. Anna went to say goodbye to Catherine, who was sitting over some books near the fire. There was a feeling of anti-climax.
Catherine did not move from her chair. She was paler and quieter, much less dangerous, in her morning clothes, than she seemed in the evening. She looked up at Anna, smiling slightly.
‘Are you going now?’
‘Yes, I think so.’ Anna fingered a book abstractedly. Catherine watched her gravely absent face. What distant, spiritual aloofness there was in Anna. She opened the book and looked at it unseeingly, then turned it between her hands, and finally laid it down on the table.
‘Back to Matthew?’ Catherine asked.
Anna stirred, fidgeting with her hands, and smoothing the fingers of her gloves. She felt awkward and unhappy. Her sense of inferiority made her resentful.
‘Yes, I suppose I shall,’ she said, looking down at the book again. ‘It seems the only thing to do.’
Catherine’s lips curled in a faint ironic smile.
‘The prospect doesn’t enthral you?’
‘No,’ said Anna, coldly admitting the cold fact.
‘But it’s not such a bad prospect,’ said Catherine, who was watching with her great eyes that were like two black holes in her face. Catherine had her private thoughts, and was following them up. ‘It will be amusing for you to travel — to go to a new continent. I rather envy you, in a way.’
‘Do you?’ said Anna, looking at her. ‘Well, I wish I wasn’t going. It’s too much like dying for my fancy: cutting myself off from everything.’
‘Yes. I wish you weren’t going so far away.’
Catherine took Anna’s hand, and suddenly smiled at her, intimately, with her slightly crooked mouth. There was a sudden emotional stress. Anna felt herself flushing.
‘That’s nice of you,’ she said, uncertain.
Catherine continued to hold her hand.
‘It’s true,’ she insisted, strangely emphatic, gazing with a relentless, fixed intensity, significant.
Anna lingered uncomfortably. She glanced at Catherine, but found nothing to say.
‘You must write to me,’ Catherine said. She sat looking at Anna with fixed, dark eyes.
Anna’s discomfort increased under this heavy regard, which made her somewhat abashed. She drew her hand away.
‘Very well,’ she agreed, her voice rather constrained, a half-bashful smile on her mouth.
‘You don’t ask me to write,’ said Catherine, half playful, half heavy, holding her with portentous eyes.
Anna made an impatient movement.
‘Of course I shall be glad if you will. I shall like to get letters.’
The words meant nothing particular to her. She now wished to be gone, embarrassed by the fixed look, which was also starting to irritate her. She retreated into her distant reserve.
‘Shall we ever meet again, do you think?’ asked Catherine.
‘Come out East and pay me a visit,’ Anna answered, with a mocking smile of faint irritation.
‘Perhaps I will,’ said Catherine. She smiled a very different, slow smile of latent purpose.
Anna was surprised.
‘Do you mean that?’ she asked.
‘Why not? New worlds to conquer —’ a slow, hidden significance was in Catherine’s tone. She smiled at Anna slightly, her eyes darkly dilated with some unknown intention, watching her steadily, her face seeming secretly to smile.
‘I shall invite you,’ said Anna, going to the door.
‘I shall come. Good-bye!’ said Catherine, and without moving her eyes, she sat motionless, till Anna was outside and the door closed behind her.
Anna walked quickly through the cold streets. She wanted to get away as soon as possible. She did not belong here. The interlude had been stimulating, but now it was finished. Ordinary life was beginning again — it must not catch her loitering. She was rather glad to be leaving Catherine. She knew that Catherine was pulling her in some way, establishing some sort of claim upon her which she was not prepared to admit. Catherine’s intimacy was dangerous, and Anna was glad to escape.
She walked towards the station, and all at once saw a vaguely familiar figure approaching. It was Drummond, the publisher, with a book under his arm. She hurriedly glanced round to see if there was any chance of avoiding him. There was not. Drummond was a well-built, energetic young fellow. He had seen her already, and came striding up, a smile on his face and the book under his arm. He looked carefully at Anna. Her grey eyes, unsmiling and faintly troubled, watched his approach. For some reason the encounter was distasteful to her. He was smiling a trifle uncertainly, recognizing her, but not quite sure. She looked different in her winter clothes.
‘Miss Forrester?’ he said, smiling and halting before her. He seemed to search her face with his eyes. She wondered what it was that made his eyes appear so bright, so unusually bright. He waited, and she forced herself to speak.
‘My name is Kavan now,’ she said, forcing, with difficulty, a slight smile. The words sounded foolish as they came out of her mouth.
‘You are married, then?’ he said, not taking his eyes off her. ‘Congratulations!’ His smile suddenly and unexpectedly became vivid.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured, looking away at the grey buildings and the sky.
She watched the people going past. It was chill and colourless, with the grey houses and the blank, blanched sky, and neutral looking figures moving about. He stared at her pale, quiet face. He seemed to block up the pavement; she felt she would never get past him.