It is Ginevra who speaks first. She is indeed the bolder of the two. She grips Amy’s hand and says quite firmly, ‘Amy, shall we go to _another_ to-night?’ This does not puzzle Amy, she is prepared for it, her honest grey eyes even tell that she has wanted it, but now that it is come she quails a little. ‘Another theatre?’ she murmurs. ‘Ginevra, that would be five in one week.’
Ginevra does not blanch. ‘Yes,’ she says recklessly, ‘but it is also only eight in seventeen years.’
‘Isn’t it,’ says Amy, comforted. ‘And they have taught us so much, haven’t they? Until Monday, dear, when we went to our first real play we didn’t know what Life is.’
‘We were two raw, unbleached school-girls, Amy--absolutely unbleached.’
It is such a phrase as this that gives Ginevra the moral ascendancy in their discussions.
‘Of course,’ Amy ventures, looking perhaps a little unbleached even now, ‘of course I had my diary, dear, and I do think that, even before Monday, there were things in it of a not wholly ordinary kind.’
‘Nothing,’ persists Ginevra cruelly, ‘that necessitated your keeping it locked.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ sadly enough. ‘You are quite right, Ginevra. But we have made up for lost time. Every night since Monday, including the matinee, has been a revelation.’
She closes her eyes so that she may see the revelations more clearly. So does Ginevra.
‘Amy, that heart-gripping scene when the love-maddened woman visited the _man_ in his _chambers_.’
‘She wasn’t absolutely love-maddened, Ginevra; she really loved her husband best all the time.’
‘Please don’t say it, Ginevra. She was most foolish, especially in the crepe de chine, but _we_ know that she only went to the man’s chambers to get back her letters. How I trembled for her then.’
‘I was strangely calm,’ says Ginevra the stony hearted.
‘Oh, Ginevra, I had such a presentiment that the husband would call at those chambers while she was there. And he did. Ginevra, you remember his knock upon the door. Surely you trembled then?’
‘Not even then, Amy. Somehow I felt sure that in the nick of time her lady friend would step out from somewhere and say that the letters were _hers_.’
‘Amy, how I love that bit where she says so unexpectedly, with noble self-renunciation, “He is my affianced husband.”’