THE INSIDE SAINTS
Maggie, when she was nearly home, halted suddenly.She stopped as when on the threshold of a room that should be empty one sees waiting a stranger.If at the end of all this she should lose Martin!...
There was the stranger who had come to her now and would not again depart.She recognised the sharp pain, the almost unconscious pulling back on the sudden edge of a dim pit, as something that would always be with her now--always.One knows that in the second stage of a great intimacy one's essential loneliness is only redoubled by close companionship.One asks for so much more, and then more and more, but that final embrace is elusive and no physical contact can surrender it.But she was young and did not know that yet.All she knew was that she would have to face these immediate troubles alone, that she would not see him for perhaps a week, that she would not know what his people at home were doing, and that she must not let any of these thoughts come up into her brain.She must keep them all back: if she did not, she would tumble into some foolish precipitate action.
When she reached home she was obstinate and determined.At once she found that something was the matter.During luncheon the two aunts sat like statues (Aunt Elizabeth a dumpy and squat one).Aunt Anne's aloofness was coloured now with a very human anger.Maggie realised with surprise that she had never seen her angry before.She had been indignant, disapproving, superior, forbidding, but never angry.The eyes were hard now, not with religious reserve but simply with bad temper.The mist of anger dimmed the room, it was in the potatoes and the cold dry mutton, especially was it in the hard pallid knobs of cheese.And Aunt Elizabeth, although she was frightened by her sister's anger on this occasion, shared in it.She pursed her lips at Maggie and moved her fat, podgy hand as though she would like to smack Maggie's cheeks.
Maggie was frightened--really frightened.The line of bold independence was all very well, but now risks were attached to it.