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He walked home perplexed by a sensation, sharp yet heavy, close to disappointment. Possibly he had imagined Caro cut out for some dénouement that would vindicate, or redeem, the cautious order of his own existence--a culmination, even tragic, that only she seemed fitted to enact. Or perhaps he had wished, for the greater common good, to see her sink into vapid domesticity like other women, sink into it as housewives sink exhaustedly into arm-chairs at evening. He detested the idea that she and Vail were lovers, but less for the imagined carnality than because Vail was personable, resolute, and rich. The satisfaction to Christian in withholding compassion from Caro had sprung directly from her need, her poverty. There was no power whatever now in letting Caro jolly well fend for herself. And he allowed himself, like a luxury, the honest thought: I might have helped her.
Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude."
Leadbetter's unlaced fingers came down on the blotter with a synchronized slap. "Miss Bell, do you really not find this incident utterly grotesque?"
"I know that any adherence to a principle can be called grotesque, and even made to appear so. At least for a time."
"You call it a principle. A tempest in a teacup."
"Mr. Bostock said, in a teapot."
He was now at white heat: molten Leadbetter. (To his wife that evening he would say, "I don't even mind insults, but will not tolerate verbal abuse.") "Miss Bell, since you yourself find our ways so unsatisfactory, perhaps you should seriously consider returning to--ah--New Zealand."
In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity.
"Ted." She had never used his name so much. "She is writing you today."
In that instant Grace somewhat resembled Caro, as always when matters grew serious. Ted could see it, the turn of head and the clasped hands. If he put his fingers to the nape, he would find the cord there, prominent as Caro's. He said, "She is getting married."
"Do sit down." A hostess receiving.
"I prefer to stand." A Victorian hero on the carpet, or carpets.
A salesman paused, and tweaked a nine-by-twelve.
"Thank you we're just looking." Staring at one another, Grace and Ted created a tension not easily absorbed into rugs.
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Caro would have known what to say: not the right thing, but the truth. Caro would have spoken truly or kept a true silence. In accepting to be the sweet one of the sisters, tame and tractable, Grace had by no means intended to cast herself away. She had enjoyed being sweet, and being thought sweet, but had believed she held in reserve an untapped bounty of more difficult humanity; which was not now forthcoming. Ted's suffering was not obscure to her--indeed, her imagination occasionally played out such matters in some Austro-Hungarian empire of the heart. But she could rouse no true instinct with which to feel his pain or comfort him. And was suddenly afraid that sweet people might have little imagination.
On any day of the year Grace Thrale might be smiled at in the street by an elderly couple or by some young mother herding her noisy brood: saluted, that is, as a kindred spirit. Caroline Bell never attracted this delectable complicity. There were times when Grace wished the world were not so sure of her, so confident that boredom had claimed her. Yet in her daily existence feared the smallest deviation from habit as an interruption that might bring chaos. Grace no more wanted adventure than Dora wanted peace. She did not convince herself, as some women do, that she retained capacity for a wholly different existence ruled by exalted and injurious passions: Grace knew perfectly how the practised conformity of her days gratified her own desires. Yet one might cling to security and still be bored by it. In its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance; but that rescue might wear down, like any other.
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Passing through decreed phases, Margaret Tice was first a bride, next a young housewife, and then an expectant mother. Later, would be constrained to talk of schools, join a tennis club and a committee. Would hear herself say, as if it were some other woman, "I never use cornstarch" or "I clean up as I go along." She felt this happening to her like symptoms of mild illness, and did not resist. But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.
Informed of the situation by Grace, Christian said, "Vail was a fool ever to get mixed up in it." But Christian was in fact content that Adam should take on Dora. It seemed something--like Lend-Lease, or the Marshall Plan--that an American should do. He told Grace, "I carried the burden long enough."
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In his solitude he said, "I blame myself." An accusation that seldom rings entirely true. If Christian placed blame elsewhere, then it was, curiously enough, on literature. He blamed--but that was not the word--the promptings and colourings of language, that put sights in his eyes and sentiments in his heart. He felt himself importuned by echoes that preceded utterance, betrayed by metaphors and exaltations that, acquired young, could never be eradicated.
Literature was a good servant but a bad master.
She took up a parched sandwich whose lifting corners bared a scaled sardine. She left the tough crusts with the half-gherkin on her plate. When they went out the man at the bar looked at her openly, tenderly, ignoring Christian's claim or seeing through it.
In the street Christian said, "You had an admirer in there." He did not mean himself.
"Yes."
Having drawn the man to her attention, he was displeased to find she had seen him. In no time obviously she will take up with someone else. You iron your hair, you nickname God's creatures, go thy ways.
On the Old World, History lay like a paralysis. In France, the generals died. In Italy a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle.
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Caro sat beside this obscure man who had risked himself and lived to tell, offhandedly, the tale. She said, "There are those, too, who befriend the weak because they feel themselves unworthy of the strong. Because they cannot bring themselves to honour abilities greater than their own." But who are the weak, she was wondering; who are the strong? This man had actually displayed the heroism most people confine to their fantasies. He had left nothing, in his nature, to be resisted or exposed. Because of him, one could look on the green vega as a place where one man at least had earned a right to be.