But the next morning Violet decided she would withdraw, give Sally time, give herself time. She would stay in bed. A batch of books had arrived from London. She would forget Charles and Sally; she would try to recapture the equilibrium which these last days had all but upset.

Charles was delighted. “We’ll go to town,” he announced to Sally. “You’ll see the gathering of donkeys and donkey-carts. It’s quite a sight.”

Sally felt caught up in his elation, glad of the relief trom tension, glad that Violet would not see her face for she had cried half the night, that intensity having found the rock against which it could break and release itself in a surf of tears. As she stood on the terrace and waited for Charles and the car, she looked up at the house and felt really like a prisoner making his escape. And once outside the gates, purring along up and down the green hills and past the rivers, the ruined castles, the tinkers’ carts pulled up by the wayside, once away from the demesne, she could breathe freely again. Everything seemed normal and she could even wonder what had made her get into such a state. Her feeling for Violet unknotted itself and was diffused by the open spaces, and seemed quite unreal like a dream.

Later in the pub, where they drank lager, Sally tested out this change in herself by talking quite condescendingly about Violet, quite from above as if she were grown-up and Violet a mere child. They relaxed, she and Charles, into the sense of power that indulgent love may bring.

“Violet is bored, I expect,” Charles said, rather smugly.

“She’s never bored.” Sally was on the defensive at once. “But she goes off on some spiral of her own, some inner spiral. She’s just not there.”

“Quite,” said Charles. “What you can’t know is that she’s always been surrounded, rather, I mean by people who admired her, young men and so forth. She lights up for people.”

“It’s her reason for existing—yes—”

“Do you think so? Is that it, eh?” Charles lit a cigarette, expansive. It was quite extraordinary how this young girl understood things. In some way it seemed that Sally was inside his feeling, not outside it—in some way he felt she had a right to speak.

“And yet the queer thing is, Charles, that she feels so much guilt about it—is always struggling against what she needs, despising herself for needing it. She talks so much about feeling old. It’s ridiculous,” said Sally with the authority of a lover.

“Of course you never saw her as she was,” Charles said thoughtfully.

“She’s more beautiful now,” Sally said almost crossly. She could not bear to think she had not seen Violet then.

Charles was amused by this vehemence. “It’s fun to have someone in the family to talk to. I don’t often talk about Violet, you know.”

“I know”—Sally smiled back at him quietly—“I’m glad too.”

“When you first came, you seemed rather at bay. It was disconcerting.”

Sally frowned. This came too close.

“I wanted to be loyal to Ian. He’s all I’ve got.”

“But I don’t see why the two things are incompatible,” Charles said gently, feeling her alarm. “Are they?”

“I can’t explain. It’s too complicated.” This conversation which had begun so well was becoming too difficult. Sally looked at her watch. “Heavens, Charles, we’ll be late for lunch!”

Charles sang silly songs all the way back. Once he slipped an arm across Sally’s shoulders and gave her a hug, but it all seemed part of the song he was singing and she rather liked it. She felt safe with Charles. In some way they had become allies against Violet and Violet’s moods, the enormous amount of atmosphere Violet displaced. When she was with him, Sally could think of Ian. It was a long time since this had been possible at all.

But Charles felt a pang of jealousy when he saw a letter from Ian on the hall table when they got back. He watched Sally tear it open and then run off upstairs, wondered what her look of surprise, of shock could mean.

It meant that Ian was asking if he could fly over for a weekend, and hardly said more than that. He asked Sally to cable if possible so that he could make plans—he would have a few days free in a little over a week. But Sally found that she could not answer this offhand without some thought—she was not quite sure that she wanted Ian to come, just now, just when things seemed to be smoothing out to a kind of happiness and peace. She found she dreaded having to feel so much, having to face the reality of what she had dreamed and set apart in a world of fantasy. At lunch she was absentminded and Charles, guessing part of the reason, minded.

“I am sick and tired of this bloody weather,” he said to Violet, bursting in on her just as she was about to take a nap.

“Didn’t you have a good morning with Sally?” Violet asked.

“Yes, I suppose so. Now she’s had a letter from Ian. It’s upset her,” Charles said crossly.

“Oh.” Violet considered this and considered him, smoking moodily in the straight chair by her bed. “Sally’s got her own life, you know, darling. She’s not our possession.”

“I never said she was.”

“No, that’s true, you didn’t—but”—Violet smiled carefully—“you’re behaving rather as if she was. Is that quite wise?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“All right then, let me read in peace.”

Sally, Violet thought, is at the place in her life where without being aware of it, she is like lightning that may strike anywhere. She’s a bolt of life. In the last five minutes it had become crystal clear to Violet that her queer vision of Charles and Sally in each other’s arms had had a partial truth in it. Then she looked around the high spacious room, and at the rain outside. They were all three losing their sense of proportion in the rain, and she for one would hold on to hers. So she forced herself to read, until she could lie down and sleep for an hour. Tomorrow, she told herself, I shall think all this out. Tomorrow the sun may be out and we shall all be different.

But the minute Charles came in that night, Violet sensed that something had happened. What? She had not been a witness to the evening, but she sensed its atmosphere at once.

Sally and Charles had had a long talk about Sarah St. Leger. Sally, unable to come to a decision about Ian, had thrown herself with relief into Charles’s expansive flattering mood. She plied him with questions and he foraged around in the desk happily to bring out a photograph of another painting of Sarah, dressed in black, her hair pulled back tight from the round full forehead, an air of implacable authority and willed kindness in the large eyes which Sally found repulsive. There was also an engraving, rather crude, of Sarah dispensing soup to an emaciated group of sufferers from the Famine.

“I don’t think I should have liked Sarah,” Sally said decidedly, “she was righteous wasn’t she? She never doubted herself.”

Would she have felt this three weeks ago? Wouldn’t Sarah St. Leger three weeks ago have been the one person she was searching for in the past of the house? She after all had had a social conscience. The words came to Sally’s mind like curiosities from another world. I’m changing, she thought, with panic. I’m no longer the same.

“But,” she said turning to Charles, “she does add something to the history of the house, doesn’t she? I guess it’s big enough to contain all kinds of life—a cosmos.”

Charles smiled. “A cosmos sounds a bit exaggerated.”

“Americans like big words,” and Sally laughed at her former self. “You’re quite right, Charles. It’s just an old house lost in the green—that’s all it needs to be. Oh dear,” she sighed, “there I go again, no sense of proportion as Aunt Violet would say.”

“People with no sense of proportion get things done,” Charles answered, enjoying the argument and Sally’s quick response.

Sally met the amused regard in his eyes. It was nice to be admired. It made her feel set up, grown-up, not clumsy as she always did with Violet. She did not need or want to be one with Charles, so she was not afraid. Not even when he closed his strong warm hand over hers. It seemed natural, the pact that sealed a good day.

But to Charles this gesture had acted as an explosion of life. This was not love or anything like it, but only a way to recapture his sense of himself. Violet would receive the full impact, not Sally.

She felt it at once when he came in, the physical triumph in him. She felt it later in the return of a kind of violence, almost brutal in its self-absorption. He made love to her as if she weren’t there, as if he were battling some unknown antagonist, perhaps time. It was as if he were saying “Hurry, hurry, we’ll be dead before”—what? What he meant was that he had to prove himself again with a new person to be reassured, and that for a while Violet would have to be a lightning conductor. Violet knew this mood. It had always been the first warning of a love affair.

And now she was afraid for herself, for Charles (would he be hurt?), above all for Sally who probably had no idea what she was doing. She had never cared before about the other woman. Charles took what he wanted. He did it cleanly and well, she thought, with a kind of admiration. He cut out remorse, carried himself with an athletic balance like a swimmer in a strong tide. She had never been foolish enough to stand in his way, knowing always that the tide would eventually turn back to her and quite willing to accept a double standard. But now it was different; she was responsible; she was involved in two ways.

Violet dreamed that she was caught in weeds at the bottom of a pond, waking half strangled by the sheet, in a sweat of fear. All night the rain and wind poured down against the windows.