Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

24. CHAPTER XXIV (continued)

Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her grandfather's portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next her in a friendly way, and said:

"Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were here! I felt myself getting ruder and ruder."

"You are not good at hiding your feelings," he returned dryly.

"Oh, don't scold me--I've had a horrid afternoon." She told him how she had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick, and how South Kensington impressed her as the preserve of officers' widows. She described how the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so natural to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out what he had in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his pocket. There was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in the next room. The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But, unless Katharine began the subject of her own accord, he could not even hint--he must ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a gentleman to preserve a bearing that was, as far as he could make it, the bearing of an undoubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He talked rather more quickly than usual about the possibility that some of the operas of Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received a notice, he said, and at once produced a pocket-book stuffed with papers, and began shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope between his finger and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company had become in some way inseparably attached to it.

"A letter from Cassandra?" said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the world, looking over his shoulder. "I've just written to ask her to come here, only I forgot to post it."

He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the sheets, and read the letter through.