“Oh, yes; I went to see a little more of my grave dug! From the way things are getting on, it should be quite ready for me to lie down in on Thursday night.”
“My dear, what nonsense! Besides, every manager likes rehearsals to go badly. Good rehearsals mean a bad first night. Bad rehearsals give a sort of courage of despair, which is far the most efficient sort. Oh, Edith, it’s good too, and you know it! Dear Andrew Robb! What a name to have chosen! Anyhow, I don’t think a soul has guessed who wrote it.”
“I don’t see how anybody could have,” said Edith. “Nobody knows except you and Mr. Jervis, and I never speak to him in the theatre. He always comes to see me afterwards, and we make what we can out of the rather undecipherable notes I have scribbled.”
Again she moved restlessly up and down the room.
“But whatever happens,” she said, “I shall never regret having written it. It really kept me alive and sane, Peggy, during the first two years after Dennis’s death. I think I must have gone mad otherwise. But the bringing to birth of that child of one’s brain kept me alive; and whether it proves to be a miserable little deformed cripple or a healthy baby is another question.”
“Ah, you darling!” she said, kissing her. “And it is all healed now, is it not?”
“Yes, I think it is healed,” she said. “But you know things can’t be quite the same; it can never be quite as if those years had never happened. If one has had a wound, a burn, though the skin grows over it and the doctors say it has healed perfectly, yet it isn’t soft and smooth like other skin. It is hard, as if Nature instinctively gave an extra protection over the place that had been hurt. And this was over my heart, dear.”
“I know you think like that,” she said, “but you won’t always. Think how much you have regained of yourself in these three years. How much of you there is again, when a year or two ago, dear Edith, there was so little of anything. Make it complete again some day.”
“Why, of course. No woman is herself until she finds her man. And really, dear, you are beginning to sit up and take notice, as they say of children. Do find him!”
“At the age of forty-two it requires a good deal of search,” said Edith.
“You are not forty-two. People don’t have any age until they cease to matter. You matter immensely. Why, supposing I were to go about London saying you were forty-two, people would say that I must be fifty! No woman is any age until people cease to care about her.”