The Way of Ambition Part 21

"Shall we sit here?" she said, pointing to two chairs under some palm trees by a little table.

"Yes. Why not?" returned Susan Fleet.

They sat down.

"Do you feel better?" asked Susan.

"I shall."

"It must be dreadful being ill at sea. I never am."

"And you have travelled a great deal, haven't you?"

"Yes, I have. I often go with Adelaide. Once we went to India."

"Was it there you became a Theosophist?"

"That had something to do with it, I suppose. When we were at Benares Adelaide thought she would like to live there. The day after she thought so she found we must go away."

Miss Fleet carefully peeled off her white gloves and leaned back. Her odd eyes seemed to drop in their sockets, as if they were trying to tumble out.

"Isn't it--" Charmian began, and stopped abruptly.

"Yes?"

"I don't know what I was going to say."

"Perhaps a great bore not to be one's own mistress?" suggested Miss Fleet, composedly.

"Something of that sort perhaps."

"Oh, no! I'm accustomed to it. Freedom is a phrase. I'm quite as free as Adelaide. It's usually a great mistake to pity servants."

"And oneself? I suppose you would say it was a great mistake to pity oneself?"

"I never do it," replied Miss Fleet.

She had charming hands. One of them lay on the little table with a beam of the sun on it.

"Perhaps you haven't great desires? Perhaps you don't want many things?"

"I suppose I've been like most women in that respect. But I shall be fifty almost directly."

"How frightful!" was Charmian's mental comment.

"No, it isn't."

"Isn't what?" said Charmian, startled.

"It isn't at all awful to be fifty, or any other age, if you accept it quietly as inevitable. But everything one kicks against hurts one, of course. I expect to pa.s.s a very pleasant day on my fiftieth birthday."

Charmian put her chin in her hand.

"How did you know what I thought?"

"A girl of your age would be almost certain to think something of that kind."

"Yes, I suppose so."

Charmian sighed, and then suddenly felt rather angry, and lifted her chin.

"But surely I need not be exactly like every other girl of twenty-one!"

she exclaimed, with much more vivacity.

"You aren't. No girl is. But you all think it must be dreadful to be a moneyless spinster of fifty. I believe, for my part, that there's many a _vieille fille_ who is not particularly sorry for herself or for the man who didn't want to marry her."

Miss Fleet was smiling.

"But I'm not a pessimist as regards marriage," she added. "And I think men are quite as good as women, and quite as bad."

"How calm you are!"

"Why not?"

"I could never be like that."

"Perhaps when you are fifty."

"Not if I'm unmarried!" said Charmian, with a bluntness, a lack of caution very rare in her.

"I don't think you will be, unless you go on before you are fifty."

Charmian gazed at Miss Fleet, and was conscious that she herself was entirely concentrated on the present life; she was a good girl, she had principles, even sometimes desires not free from n.o.bility. She believed in a religion--the Protestant religion it happened to be. And yet--yes, certainly--she was absolutely concentrated on the present life. She even felt as if it were somehow physically impossible for her to be anything else. To "go on" before she was fifty! What a horror in that idea! To "go on" at all, ever--how strange, how dreadful! She was silent for some minutes, with her pretty head against the back of a chair.

An Arab dragoman went by among the trees. The strangled yelp of a motor-car rose out of a cloud of white dust at the bottom of the garden.

The faint cry of a siren came up from the distant sea where _The Wanderer_ lay at rest. And suddenly Charmian thought, "When am I going to be here again?"

"Do you ever feel you have lived before in some place when you visit it for the first time?" she said, moving her head from the back of her chair.

"I did once."

"Do you ever feel you will live in a place that's new to you, that you have no connection with, and that you have only come to for a day or two?"

"I can't say I do."

"I suppose we all have lots of absurd fancies."

"I don't think I do," responded Miss Fleet, quite without arrogance.