“Reminds you of the story of the deluge,” muttered the man, stretched at her feet and looking at them. “Are you frightened at it?”
“I should be rather frightened to be left behind alone. When I say, I, of course I mean we.”
“Do you?” . . . Heyst remained silent for a while. “The vision of a world destroyed,” he mused aloud. “Would you be sorry for it?”
“I should be sorry for the happy people in it,” she said simply.
His gaze travelled up her figure and reached her face, where he seemed to detect the veiled glow of intelligence, as one gets a glimpse of the sun through the clouds.
“I should have thought it's they specially who ought to have been congratulated. Don't you?”
“Oh, yes--I understand what you mean; but there were forty days before it was all over.”
“You seem to be in possession of all the details.”
Heyst spoke just to say something rather than to gaze at her in silence. She was not looking at him.
“Sunday school,” she murmured. “I went regularly from the time I was eight till I was thirteen. We lodged in the north of London, off Kingsland Road. It wasn't a bad time. Father was earning good money then. The woman of the house used to pack me off in the afternoon with her own girls. She was a good woman. Her husband was in the post office. Sorter or something. Such a quiet man. He used to go off after supper for night-duty, sometimes. Then one day they had a row, and broke up the home. I remember I cried when we had to pack up all of a sudden and go into other lodgings. I never knew what it was, though--”
He felt intensely aware of her personality, as if this were the first moment of leisure he had found to look at her since they had come together. The peculiar timbre of her voice, with its modulations of audacity and sadness, would have given interest to the most inane chatter. But she was no chatterer. She was rather silent, with a capacity for immobility, an upright stillness, as when resting on the concert platform between the musical numbers, her feet crossed, her hands reposing on her lap. But in the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensation of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force--or simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of complete surrender.