[…] she turns her face from the telephone with that look of irritation—as if she had seen something messy which she was unable to clean up—which is her private expression of pity.
It is one of Miss Marsalles’ indestructible beliefs that she can see into children’s hearts, and she finds there a treasury of good intentions and a natural love of all good things. The deceits which her spinster’s sentimentality has practiced on her original good judgement are legendary and colossal; she has this way of speaking of children’s hearts as if they were something holy; it is hard for a parent to know what to say.
It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways, impossible, for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.
Here they found themselves year after year […] drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance—not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room. […] They exchanged smiles which showed no lack of good manners, and yet expressed a familiar, humorous amazement at the sameness of things […]; so they acknowledged the incredible, the wholly unrealistic persistence of Miss Marsalles and her sister and their life.
But after the house in Rosedale was gone, after it had given way to the bungalow on Bank Street, these conversations about Miss Marsalles’ means did not take place; this aspect of Miss Marsalles’ life had passed into that region of painful subjects which it is crude and unmannerly to discuss.
“Oh well I feel kind of sorry for a couple of old ladies like them. They’re a couple of babies, the pair.”
My mother seems unable, although she makes a great effort, to take her eyes off the dining-room table and the complacent journeys of the marauding flies. Finally she achieves a dreamy, distant look, with her eyes focused somewhere above the punch-bowl, which makes it possible for her to keep her head turned in that direction and yet does not in any positive sense give her away.
“Sometimes that kind is quite musical,” says Mrs. Clegg.
“Who are they?” my mother whispers, surely not aware of how upset she sounds.
“They’re from that class she has out at the Greenhill School. They’re nice little things and some of them are quite musical but of course they’re not all there.”
My mother and the others are almost audible saying to themselves: No, I know it is not right to be repelled by such children and I am not repelled, but nobody told me I was going to come here to listen to a procession of little—little idiots for that’s what they are—WHAT KIND OF A PARTY IS THIS?
The mothers sit, caught with a look of protest on their faces, a more profound anxiety than before, as if reminded of something that they had forgotten they had forgotten; the white-haired girl sits ungracefully at the piano with her head hanging down, and the music is carried through the open door and the windows to the cindery summer street.
[…] people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one.
To Miss Marsalles such a thing is acceptable, but to other people, people who live in the world, it is not.
[…] why is it that we are unable to say—as we must have expected to say—Poor Miss Marsalles? It is the Dance of the Happy Shades that prevents us, it is that one communiqué from the other country where she lives.
