“I am afraid you would have to upheave the universe, my dear.”
Felicia looked at her with such wonderful gravity in her brown eyes that Katherine broke into a laugh.
“Well, you can do it gradually. Begin with my work-basket, will you? and find me a spool of No. 100 thread.”
Without overstepping the bounds of kindly friendship, they saw much of each other. An imperceptible shadow of reserve in Katherine's manner, a certain variability of mood, a vein of hardness in her nature ever liable to be exposed by a chance thought, checked in the young girl the impulses of a more generous affection. Katherine was conscious of this; conscious, too, of no efforts to win more from the girl. Now and then she sounded a note of explanation.
Once they were talking of the pension's dreariness--an endless topic. It happened that Felicia was disposed to take a cheerful view.
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” she said.
“By way of heightening its blackness, my dear,” said Katherine. “Besides, the lining is turned to heaven and the blackness to earth, so it does not help us much.”
“Bitter?” echoed Katherine, musingly. “Oh, no! I am not, really. But perhaps it were better that you should think so.”
But for all her refusal to admit Felicia any deeper into her heart, Katherine welcomed her companionship frankly. She had looked forward almost shudderingly to the dreary isolation of the winter. Whom could she choose as a companion, to exchange a thought with beyond those of ordinary civility? By a process of elimination she had arrived at little Miss Bunter, with her canaries, her _Family Herald_ and _Modern Society_, her mild spinsterish chit-chat. It was a depressing prospect; but Felicia had saved her. Her society relieved the monotony of those terrible dreary, idle days, took her out of herself, stilled for a few odd hours the yearnings for a bright full life--yearnings all the more inwardly gnawing by reason of the ever exerted strain to check their outward expression.
She was standing before her glass one morning brushing her hair. She had shaken it back loose; it was fair, long, and thick, and she had taken up the brush languidly. She was not feeling well. Frau Schultz had unsuccessfully tried to provoke a quarrel the night before; a little graceful experiment in philanthropy that had engaged her attention of late had ignominiously failed; the rain was pouring in torrents outside; the day contained no hope; a crushing sense of the futility of things came over her like a pall. She had roused herself, given her hair a determined shake, and commenced to brush vigorously, looking at herself sideways in the glass. But a weak pity for the weary, delicate face she saw there filled her eyes with tears. Her arm seemed heavy and tired. She dropped the brush and sank down on a chair, and spreading her arms on the toilet-table, buried her face in them.