Leonora | Page 2

hollowed out, and no tightness on the part of a bodice
could hide this charming concavity. Her face was handsome with its
large regular features; one noticed the abundant black hair under the hat,
the thick eyebrows, the brown and opaque skin, the teeth impeccably
white, and the firm, unyielding mouth and chin. Underneath the chin,
half muffling it, came a white muslin bow, soft, frail, feminate, an
enchanting disclaimer of that facial sternness and the masculinity of

that tailor-made dress, a signal at once provocative and wistful of the
woman. She had brains; they appeared in her keen dark eyes. Her
judgment was experienced and mature. She knew her world and its men
and women. She was not too soon shocked, not too severe in her
verdicts, not the victim of too many illusions. And yet, though
everything about her witnessed to a serene temperament and the
continual appeasing of mild desires, she dreamed sadly, like the girls in
the archway, of an existence more distinguished than her own; an
existence brilliant and tender, where dalliance and high endeavour,
virtue and the flavour of sin, eternal appetite and eternal satisfaction,
were incredibly united. Even now, on her fortieth birthday, she still
believed in the possibility of a conscious state of positive and continued
happiness, and regretted that she should have missed it.
The imminence and the arrival of this dire birthday, this day of wrath
on which the proudest woman will kneel to implacable destiny and beg
a reprieve, had induced the reveries natural to it--the self-searching, the
exchange of old fallacies for new, the dismayed glance forward, the
lingering look behind. Absorbed though she was in the control of the
sensitive steed, the field of her mind's eye seemed to be entirely filled
by an image of the woman of forty as imagined by herself at the age of
twenty. And she was that woman now! But she did not feel like forty;
at thirty she had not felt thirty; she could only accept the almanac and
the rules of arithmetic. The interminable years of her marriage rolled
back, and she was eighteen again, ingenuous and trustful, convinced
that her versatile husband was unique among his sex. The fading of a
short-lived and factitious passion, the descent of the unique male to the
ordinary level of males, the births of her three girls and their rearing
and training: all these things seemed as trifles to her, mere excrescences
and depressions in the vast tableland of her monotonous and placid
career. She had had no career. Her strength of will, of courage, of love,
had never been taxed; only her patience. 'And my life is over!' she told
herself, insisting that her life was over without being able to believe it.
As the dog-cart was crossing the railway bridge at Shawport, at the foot
of the rise to Hillport, Leonora overtook her eldest daughter. She drew
up. From the height of the dog-cart she looked at her child; and the

girlishness of Ethel's form, the self-consciousness of newly-arrived
womanhood in her innocent and timid eyes, the virgin richness of her
vitality, made Leonora feel sad, superior, and protective.
'Oh, mother! Where's father?' Ethel exclaimed, staring at her, struck
with a foolish wonder to see her mother where her father had been an
hour before.
'What a schoolgirl she is! And at her age I was a mother twice over!'
thought Leonora; but she said aloud: 'Jump up quickly, my dear. You
know Prince won't stand.'
Ethel obeyed, awkwardly. As she did so the mother scrutinised the
rather lanky figure, the long dark skirt, the pale blouse, and the straw
hat, in a single glance that missed no detail. Leonora was not quite
dissatisfied; Ethel carried herself tolerably, she resembled her mother;
she had more distinction than her sisters, but her manner was often
lackadaisical.
'Your father was very vexed about something,' said Leonora, when she
had recounted the meeting at the top of Oldcastle Street. 'Where's
Milly?'
'I don't know, mother--I think she went out for a walk.' The girl added
apprehensively: 'Why?'
'Oh, nothing!' said Leonora, pretending not to observe that Ethel had
blushed. 'If I were you, Ethel, I should let that belt out one hole ... not
here, my dear child, not here. When you get home. How was Aunt
Hannah?'
Every day one member or another of John Stanway's family had to pay
a visit to John's venerable Aunt Hannah, who lived with her brother, the
equally venerable Uncle Meshach, in a little house near the parish
church of St. Luke's. This was a social rite the omission of which
nothing could excuse. On that day it was Ethel who had called.
'Auntie was all right. She was making a lot of parkin, and of course I

had