Chapter 9 #2
She looked up. Across the room Louisa was still talking to Lady Somebody’s daughter, animated, her face revealing each passing thought before discretion had the chance to intervene. She had either not heard or had heard and chosen not to look over. From this distance, Sophia could not tell.
At the far end of the room Roland said something that made Westbrook laugh, and Mr. Ashcombe smiled, at ease in his own house, and Sophia looked at the pattern on the carpet and at the window where the May afternoon pressed against the glass, the dusty gold of it, the smell of coal smoke beginning to thicken as the hour turned, and at her teacup and at nothing in particular, and sat with all of it very quietly and said nothing and felt the afternoon rearrange itself into something she had not been prepared for.
Mrs. Ferrars was saying something about a concert at the Argyll Rooms. Sophia made the appropriate response.
She was, she noted distantly, very good at appropriate responses even when the ground had shifted underneath her.
Whether this was a useful quality or a worrying one she could not determine at present.
She did not look at Roland again before the tea ended.
* * *
The tea ended at half past four. Sophia said the correct things and got through it.
Roland was standing near the door as she passed, saying something to Westbrook with his hat already in hand. “Miss Lockwood,” he said as she went by. “Mr. Colville,” she said, and went through the door.
The afternoon was warm on the pavement. They turned south without discussing it, which was the direction of home for both of them, and walked for the first two streets without speaking. This was not unusual between them. Their silences had never required filling.
But this one had a different quality and they both knew it.
“She is accomplished,” Louisa said at last, neither warmly nor coldly, as she spoke of people she had known too long to be dazzled by.
“Yes,” Sophia said.
“She has been accomplished since she was seventeen. She came out knowing exactly what she was and what she was for, and she has been doing it very well ever since.” A pause. “Some people are like that. The Season fits them so precisely that there is no visible gap between the person and the role.”
Sophia said nothing. She was listening.
“It is an advantage,” Louisa said. “In most circumstances.”
They walked. The afternoon traffic moved around them, a carriage passing too close, a vendor on the corner with something hot and strongly scented. They waited until they had cleared it.
“I watched you this afternoon,” Louisa said. Not apologetically, simply as a fact she had decided to offer. “Something changed in you between the first and second cup of tea. I could not account for it.”
Sophia considered this for a moment. She had not expected Louisa to say it aloud.
“I heard something,” she said. “From Mrs. Ferrars. Nothing directed at me. She was merely thinking aloud.”
She did not say what. Louisa did not ask. There was a kind of understanding between them that did not require the complete sentence, and they had both known it was there for some time.
They walked another half street. Then Louisa said, looking straight ahead,
“I have observed, over three Seasons, that there are men who know what they want and pursue it. They do not wait. They are perhaps not always sensible about it, but they are clear.” She paused.
“And there are men who know what is expected of them, and who have not yet found the thing that makes the expected feel insufficient. Those men wait. They are not dishonest about it. They simply have not yet been given sufficient reason to stop waiting.”
She said it evenly, to the pavement ahead of her, making a general observation about the world they had both been living in.
Sophia walked beside her and did not speak.
“That is all I will say about it,” Louisa said. “Because it is all I can say about it honestly.”
They had reached the corner. Brook Street to the right, Clarges Street ahead. They stopped.
Louisa looked at her with a warm, direct, steady gaze and said nothing further.
“Wednesday,” Sophia said.
“Wednesday,” Louisa said. And turned right.
Sophia walked the remaining streets alone and went through the Clarges Street door and stood in the hall with her gloves still on, thinking about men who had not yet found the thing that made the expected feel insufficient, and about one assumes these things find their natural conclusion eventually, and about both things at once, and found they did not cancel each other out but sat side by side in a way she could not yet arrange into a conclusion.
She went upstairs. She did not open the manuscript.
She sat on the edge of the bed and looked toward the window and let the May evening come in through the glass, the light fading by degrees, the smell of the street below changing as the lamps were lit, coal smoke and horses and damp rising from the gutter stones.
She sat with the thing she was carrying and did not yet know what to call it. Was not ready to call it anything.
From the street below came the clatter of an iron wheel on stone, passing quickly through the evening and away again.